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.
This chapter gives an explication of the way in which the airline industry performs and reports on Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility (CSR). The connected case study (see Chap. 11) uses Air France-KLM as example. It becomes clear that airlines’ attitudes towards CSR depend on their geographic location, business model, and business performance. Their reporting on CSR is generally of lower quality and mainly relates to environmental issues, while social and ethical issues are apparently either considered of lesser importance or are more difficult to operationalise. Concerning the environmental impact, for example, it appears that airlines with a green public image tend to score low on a climate change index. This finding evokes concern that airlines might use CSR reporting mainly for PR purposes. This chapter includes a section on ethical reflection on CSR in the airline industry and concludes that a more fundamental approach to the issue of unsustainable growth of aviation, restricted volume growth, needs active and robust government guidance and cooperation with the airline industry.
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