Suchergebnisse

Recent years have seen a renewed focus on labor standards in the supply chain, prompted by legislation that requires firms to provide an account of their efforts to combat modern slavery. However, as a common problem of non-financial disclosure regulation, companies can decide the extent and content of their reporting, which could potentially result in merely symbolic disclosures with little substance. We examine the disclosure of substantive actions in modern slavery statements, defined as those disclosures of corporate actions that can positively affect working conditions in supply chains. We examine the corporate disclosure of these actions over time in order to evaluate whether legally mandated disclosure requirements could lead to progress in combatting modern slavery. For this purpose, we collected modern slavery statements from companies that had issued such statements for at least two different years after the introduction of the regulatory requirement in the United Kingdom and performed a content analysis with a coding instrument that captures substantive actions against modern slavery. Our analysis uncovers extremely heterogeneous reporting practices, especially regarding the disclosure of the effectiveness of actions against modern slavery. Based on our analysis, we identify best practices of substantive disclosures to offer a benchmark for corporate self-reports of modern slavery and inform policymaking on modern slavery reporting.

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of the financial news produced by companies, financial analysts, financial newspapers and news agencies about the same news events, including data before and after the financial crisis. We ground this study in second-level agenda-setting, according to which news producers select substantive and evaluative attributes for the issues they cover. Using computer-assisted text analysis, we conduct pairwise comparisons of the evaluative tone of corporate quarterly earnings press releases and the corresponding analyst reports and news stories. Our overall hypothesis is that these actors produce news about the same events with an evaluative tone that furthers their own goals as well as the goals of those actors they are dependent on, which we find partial support for. We find a positivity bias in corporate earnings press releases and analyst reports, while financial journalists eliminate the corporate positivity bias, but do not add more negativity. The results also indicate differences in the tone of financial news before and after the financial crisis. Although all actors produce news in the period after the financial crisis that is less positive and less negative than before the crisis, the balance of positive and negative tone as well as relative differences among the actors suggest that news writing by financial journalists at financial newspapers and news agencies is more negative in tone after the financial crisis, thus providing also empirical support of their independence.

Alleged organizational wrongdoings are often characterized by high levels of uncertainty about what happened, which can take years to be established judicially. In this study, we examine organizations' efforts to manage their stakeholders' impressions of their possible guilt in this period of uncertainty. The study examines the discursive guilt-management strategies organizations employ in such situations to embrace the paradoxical tensions that emerge between their routine, positive self-presentations as responsible organizations and their communication about their possible guilt. Taking departure in impression management and a paradox perspective, we conceptualize guilt management as a discursive practice enacted in times of uncertainty. Specifically, we conduct a microlevel discourse analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports published by large US banks after the financial crisis and analyze how these banks managed impressions of their possible guilt, before they eventually agreed to legal settlements. We identify amending, bracketing, shifting locus of control, implicating, as well as reattributing and extending moral agency as central guilt-management strategies that embrace the paradoxical tensions between the banks' positive self-presentations and their communication about their possible guilt. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and methodological contributions to organization studies.

Nachhaltigkeit ist ein Schlüsselbegriff der heutigen Gesellschaft. Er durchzieht unternehmerische, soziale, umweltbezogene, ökonomische, politische und viele andere Diskurse. Die AutorInnen beleuchten Schnittstellen von Nachhaltigkeit und Kommunikation. Aus der Sicht unterschiedlicher Perspektiven und Disziplinen wie der Linguistik, Wirtschafts- und Unternehmenskommunikation, Betriebswirtschaftslehre, Soziologie oder des Marketing werden Prinzipien, Phänomene und Fallbeispiele von Nachhaltigkeit in der Kommunikation dargestellt und diskutiert. ?