When corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a sensemaking process is assessed from a corporate governance perspective, this implies that stakeholders do not only influence companies by promoting and enforcing regulations and other corporate guidelines. They also influence companies by promoting regulation on influence pathways, by demanding that companies develop formal mechanisms that allow companies and stakeholders to discuss and in some cases agree on changes to principles and policies. This perspective suggests that regulation is an outcome of power relations and is, as such, a reflection of certain mental models. As such, mental models reveal the political bias in corporate governance perspectives. For this reason, CSR research needs to be clear about the underlying assumptions about corporate governance, and corporate governance research needs to disclose which mental models of CSR influence the outcomes. Taking a governance perspective on the development of mental models of CSR helps to understand the interaction between CSR and processes of sensemaking at the institutional, organizational and individual levels.
Corporate reputation is becoming increasingly important for firms; social media platforms such as Twitter are used to convey their message. In this paper, corporate reputation will be assessed from a sustainability perspective. Using sentiment analysis, the top 100 brands of the Netherlands were scraped and analyzed. The companies were registered in the sustainable industry classification system (SICS) to perform the analysis on an industry level. A semantic search tool called Open Semantic Desktop Search was used to filter through the data to find keywords related to sustainability and corporate reputation. Findings show that companies that tweet more often about corporate reputation and sustainability receive overall a more positive sentiment from the public.
The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the extent to which partnerships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are a necessity for successful efforts of businesses in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The main findings are based on an analysis of existing literature on NGO typologies and strategies for CSR and illustrated with examples from the Dutch National Research Program on CSR. Based on three different strategies towards CSR, the suggestion is that NGOs tend to become involved in partnerships with companies that have an interest in postponing concrete results, while partnerships with companies that have the potential for the biggest contribution to the ambitions of NGOs have the highest risk of diminishing NGO-legitimacy.
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