Environmental disclosure and stakeholder engagement via social media: State of the art and potential in public utilities

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development has become dominant in the current socio‐economic debate at the global level. In particular, environmental issues have become increasingly central in the action of all organisations: private, public, and hybrid. Analysing a sample of Italian public utilities, we studied the level of disclosure regarding environmental topics via public Facebook pages. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of Web 2.0 on municipally owned public utilities' voluntary disclosure of environmental issues and stakeholder interest in this field. The findings show that the use of Facebook by public utilities to disclose environmental issues is still at an early stage. However, it is constantly growing, especially in the larger companies and in those with mixed public/private ownership.

Firms’ challenges and social responsibilities during Covid-19: A Twitter analysis

“…CSR values: we argue that firms are on social networks to follow their society's values, but not necessary to follow expectations related to CSR. Results also contribute to the literature on firms and social media, showing that digital innovation, environmental sustainability and safety are the main challenges firms are facing during Covid-19; to the CSR literature [27,65], highlighting that the relevance of the CSR dimensions varies depending on the community; and to the stakeholder engagement literature [71,90,91], confirming that Twitter is overlooked as a tool to interact on CSR issues, with peculiarities arising in some communities. On the practical side, our research contributes to provide an analytics tool based on firms' Twitter data to support managers, entrepreneurs and policy makers when designing their strategies and decision making.…”

“…This is surprising, as some kinds of firms communicate in a different way, especially about CSR and environmental issues. For example, family firms are found to communicate on CSR differently from non-family firms [73] and publicly owned firms disclose less on environmental topics (contrary to the expectations [65,83]). Although ownership does not seem to influence the conversation, it is worth noting that…”

“…On the other hand, following stakeholder theory [64], firms should follow the expectations of their stakeholders and develop relationships with them, thus creating long-term value. Following this perspective, firms use online social networks to interact with their stakeholders, sharing their strategies and results [65].…”

“…Second, large firms have more resources (e.g. human, financial), which makes them more likely to invest in social and environmental reporting and dissemination [65]. Third, they usually have more stakeholders demanding information than small and medium sized firms [73].…”

Social media as stakeholder engagement tool: CSR communication failure in the oil and gas sector

“…Moreover, to understand the effects of the quality of TAP communication, a "sentiment analysis" was conducted through the software NodeXL (Smith et al, 2010). Sentiment analysis aims to evaluate the degree of positivity, neutrality, or negativity of the message produced by TAP through its Twitter channel using a lexical analysis (Giacomini et al, 2020;Taboada et al, 2011). The primary assumption of sentiment analysis is that "humans can differentiate between mild and strong emotions" (Thelwall et al, 2011).…”