Communicating corporate responsibility through corporate web sites in Spain

Abstract

PurposeThe main objective of this study is to examine the presence and organization of information on corporate responsibility that is on the corporate web sites of companies that belong to the index of the Spanish stock market.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have designed a specific tool to identify corporate responsibility issues and to analyse how information on such issues is organized and presented on corporate web sites. A content analysis methodology was applied to the web sites of the companies under study.FindingsThe results suggest that the companies that were studied assign great importance to corporate responsibility on their web sites, even though they disseminate on those sites a limited conception of what corporate responsibility is and focus mainly on the topics of social and environmental action. Another relevant finding is the highly dispersed nature of the information that is related to corporate responsibility on corporate web sites.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was conducted on a sample of companies from the Spanish stock market, and therefore the results are not necessarily representative of the entire Spanish stock market or of companies that do not trade on it.Originality/valueThis paper offers a specific methodology for the analysis of information on corporate responsibility and the organization of that information on the corporate web sites of all types of companies. The methodology and the results may be of utility to other researchers and will facilitate international comparisons of organizations regarding corporate responsibility and the manner in which information on this topic is disseminated to various stakeholders.

The Promotion of Responsible Tourism Management Through Digital Media

“…The organisational structures define the types of relationships that exist between different units of content (and groups), whilst also establishing the basic routes through which users may navigate the web site (Capriotti & Moreno, 2007b). The information that is related to a single theme needs to be structured and ordered vertically in a hierarchical sequence.…”

“…The manner in which the information is organised on a web site will determine the usability and accessibility of its contents to visitors (Davis, 1989;Davis et al, 1989). Hence, the stakeholders could easily access different CSR themes through organisational schemes and structures in corporate web sites (Capriotti & Moreno, 2007b). Many corporate websites already possess a high degree of interactivity; including their ability to disseminate information and to generate relationships between the different publics and the organisation (Capriotti & Moreno, 2007a).…”

Web pages as a tool for a strategic description of the Spanish largest firms

“…The idea of using web sites for identifying specific characteristics of a group of companies has been previously applied. With this methodology, corporate social responsibility has been analysed in Spain by Capriotti and Moreno (2007b). In other research paper, Young and Benamati (2000) applied it with large US companies to describe topics of their public web sites as product/service description, daily news highlights or job opportunities.…”

“…In a first stage, the data has been collected based on the proposals of Geest (2001), Lynch and Horton (2002), Rosenfeld and Morville (2002), and Capriotti and Moreno (2007b).…”

Conceptualizing the Limiting Issues Inhibiting Sustainability Embeddedness

“…The current methods of discourse may have established a shared knowledge amongst members that the company is committed to integrating sustainability, but nonetheless failed to improve practitioners' understanding of the concept (Green Distraction); or help them see the connection between sustainability and their jobs (Not my Job); or to convey how practitioners should manage sustainability (Firefighter). Strategy Discourse should ignite the necessary changes in order to achieve the desired sustainability-embeddedness outcome, and when failing to do so, we suggest it be considered an inhibitor to embeddedness [46,52,62,93,94].…”