CSR Communication, Corporate Reputation, and the Role of the News Media as an Agenda-Setter in the Digital Age

Abstract

By using social media, corporations can communicate about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) to the public without having to pass through the gatekeeping function of the news media. However, to what extent can corporations influence the public’s evaluation of their CSR activities with social media activities and if the legacy news media still act as the primary agenda setters when it comes to corporate reputation have not yet been thoroughly analyzed in a digitized media environment. This study addressed this research gap by looking at the effect of CSR communication through Facebook and news media coverage of CSR on corporate reputation in Switzerland. The results of this longitudinal study show that the salience and tone of news media coverage of CSR were positively related to corporate reputation, even though the news media coverage about CSR was predominantly negative. Thus, reputation was still strengthened even in the face of negative publicity. No effect of CSR communication through Facebook on corporate reputation was found. The results suggest that legacy news media still were influential in determining how the public evaluates corporations in the digital age.

Understand corporate social responsibility from an agenda setting perspective: a cross-national analysis of newspaper using computer-assisted content analysis

“…corporate websites) (Chapple and Moon, 2005), this study uses a non-corporate, providing an alternate view of CSR discourses. Second, while most previous research in the media coverage of CSR issues only focused on one country/region (Tam, 2015; Vogler and Eisenegger, 2020), this study included the samples from both developed and developing markets of CSR, showing a comparative view of CSR conceptualization in different societies with the influence from a variety of institutional factors. Third, the majority of previous studies used traditional content analysis with manual coding to handle a small sample size.…”

“…However, Luo et al (2019) used a meta-analysis of agenda-setting and suggested that both the first-level and second-level agenda setting were equally powerful in influencing the public perception of the issues and their attributes. An increasing number of empirical studies have incorporated agenda-setting theory across a variety of media, including newspapers (Tam, 2015), online media (Roberts et al , 2002) and social media (Vogler and Eisenegger, 2020). Compared to other types of media, newspapers have stronger agenda-setting effects on shaping public perceptions (Luo et al , 2019).…”

“…Yet, less is known about how newspapers follow the societal trends to portray the social realities of CSR to the public. Under media proliferation and audience segmentation, newspapers were still as powerful as other news media in agenda setting (Luo et al , 2019) and even more effective than social media in setting the public agenda in CSR issues (Vogler and Eisenegger, 2020). The globalization of CSR has contributed to the multifacetedness of its definition (Chapple and Moon, 2005; Matten et al , 2004).…”

“…Specifically, this study scrutinized what and how CSR are covered in business and mainstream English newspapers of each country/region. Theoretically, this study provides an alternate news perspective on CSR through the lens of agenda setting, which moves away from a corporate-centered, instrumental view of CSR (Tam, 2015; Vogler and Eisenegger, 2020). Based on agenda-setting theory and the institutional perspective, this study identifies salient issues and media tones in CSR-related news across different countries/regions.…”

Barreras y oportunidades para la comunicación de la responsabilidad social en redes sociales

“…Recientemente, se ha demostrado que la importancia y el tono de las noticias de RSE en los medios de comunicación tradicionales se relacionan positivamente con la reputación de una empresa, incluso si la noticia es negativa. Sin embargo, en redes sociales, no se ha demostrado la existencia de un vínculo claro entre las noticias de RSE de la empresa y su reputación (Vogler y Eisenegger, 2020). Por lo tanto, en la literatura previa se ha observado que el contenido generado por el usuario, las comunicaciones cara a cara y el poder de los medios tradicionales siguen siendo fuentes clave de reputación.…”