Do Corporate Carbon Policies Enhance Legitimacy? A Social Media Perspective

Abstract

Stakeholders are increasingly concerned about climate change and companies’ commitment to anticipate future carbon-related risks, and grant or withdraw support depending on their perceptions of firms’ carbon performance. The aim of this research is to analyse which carbon-related factors influence stakeholders with regards to the legitimacy-granting process. The sample in this study includes 146 firms from North America and Europe committed to carbon mitigation, whose legitimacy is measured via social media interactions. Findings show that setting a corporate carbon policy and disclosing an internal price of carbon are positively linked to legitimacy, while other factors are negatively or not related to legitimacy. This study makes theoretical contributions, proposing a metric based on social media stakeholder engagement to measure corporate legitimacy, as well as practical implications, revealing which carbon information shapes stakeholders’ perception of firms’ climate performance, and opening new possibilities for future research.

Non-Financial Information versus Financial as a Key to the Stakeholder Engagement: A Higher Education Perspective

“…Analyzing H2, "Size" was statistically significant (β = 0.450; p < 0.01) and thus, those universities with a higher number of students enrolled were more willing to establish different communication and participation strategies in order to enhance public online engagement. Therefore, while Galán-Valdivieso et al [85] found a negative influence of size on more active stakeholder participation, the outcomes of this paper were in accordance with Haro et al [28], who showed evidence of the positive effect of this factor on greater online engagement. A possible explanation relies on their greater exposure to public scrutiny, which leads to more attention, and in turn, reactions to information published in their social media.…”

“…As for financial information, the findings differed from those obtained by Galán-Valdivieso et al [85] and Dunne et al [119], indicating that profitability data do not create higher levels of stakeholder commitment. In general terms, these results are shared by similar studies [8,29], indicating that the increase in information disclosure of the organization fosters stakeholder engagement with the social media of the organization.…”

“…By analyzing the best-ranked universities, this study also provides further progress in the results obtained in previous research on stakeholder online engagement motivations developed in another specific context [28,85,91,116]. Four significant drivers were found, which could increase stakeholder participation in social media.…”

“…In this sense, the relationships created between the organization and its stakeholders are based on trust, and therefore create greater engagement toward the organization in response to that greater non-financial transparency. In contrast, Galán-Valdivieso et al [85] obtained mixed results, arguing that revealing certain non-financial information increased stakeholder engagement. However, they found that reports on social responsibility and profitability information had negative effects on stakeholder participation.…”

Stakeholder Legitimization of the Provision of Emergency Centralized Accommodations to Displaced Persons

“…It should be noted that the qualitative analysis of interviews is complimentary to other methods that assess decision-making processes. For instance, to obtain a more representative distribution of stakeholders, data could be gathered using surveys (e.g., [53,54]), social media (e.g., [55]), or workshops (e.g., [54]). Complimentary methods used to assess decision-making procedures include Analytic Hierarchy Process [56] and participatory mapping [54].…”