Communicating corporate LGBTQ advocacy: A computational comparison of the global CSR discourse

Abstract

Corporations are increasingly engaging with political and social issues through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, in new areas such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) advocacy. Informed by institutional theory and stakeholder theory, this article systematically, comparatively, and computationally examines the intersection of LGBTQ advocacy and CSR communication. In particular, it contributes to the literature by 1) examining the global LGBTQ CSR discourse constructed by Fortune Global 500 companies (136,820 words) with semantic network analysis and structural topic modeling; 2) surveying non-pro t organizations' guidelines and comparing corporate values with them; and 3) exploring how stakeholder expectations and institutional factors in uence CSR communication. Results indicate 6 corporate topics and 9 non-pro t topics, which were explicated by referencing organizations' original writing. It is further shown that stakeholder expectations and institutional factors not only a ect whether or not corporations report LGBTQ e orts, but also a ect what topics they highlight in CSR reports. Corporations in democratic countries with substantial stakeholder expectations emphasize areas that need high investment and exceed legal obligations.

Politicization of Science in COVID-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies

“…Structural topic model (stm) is a specific type of topic models (unsupervised machine learning) that incorporates document-level covariates (Roberts et al, 2014) and provides an easy-to-interpret output that can facilitates comparisons across corpora (Roberts et al, 2019). For example, it has been used to identify what social, environmental, and political factors predict organizations' public communication on LGBTQ issues (Zhou, 2021). By incorporating continent, industry, stakeholder expectation, and democracy index into the topic model, Zhou (2021) shows that corporations headquartered in more liberal areas are more likely to emphasize LGBTQ-related topics that exceed legal obligations.…”

Sustainability reports: Differences between developing and developed countries

“…This study used a computer-assisted strategy based on topic models and traditional qualitative reviews to analyse a large number of sustainability reports and contextualize possible findings. Although previous studies utilized a similar approach, those studies partially assumed identical topic distributions across external covariates (Goloshchapova et al, 2019;Zhou, 2021). To overcome this limitation, the present study used an STM (Roberts et al, 2016), which enabled incorporation of document metadata into the modelling process and further assessment of the relationships through simulations (Egami et al, 2018).…”

Perceived organizational authenticity in LGBTQ communication: the scale development and initial empirical findings

“…LGBTQ topics have historically been “written out” of public relations research (Edwards and L'Etang, 2013, p. 50), but have recently emerged as an interest area for communication management scholars and practitioners. Over the past several decades, LGBTQ-specific initiatives have gained traction in corporate contexts (Ball, 2019), becoming social issues for organizations (Zhou, 2021), particularly corporate engagement in issues pertaining to LGBTQ publics, like same-sex marriage (Capizzo, 2020). Research indicates that organizational LGBTQ representations largely tend to oversimplify the experiences and identities of sexual and gender minorities (Ciszek, 2017, 2020), with organizations relying on stereotypes and old tropes of gays and lesbians (Gross, 2001; Phillips, 2011; Sender, 2005), and rarely including images of transgender and gender diverse individuals (Ciasullo, 2001; Tsai, 2004).…”