Responding to Diffused Stakeholders on Social Media: Connective Power and Firm Reactions to CSR-related Twitter Messages

Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 172, pp. 229–252 (2021)

58 Pages Posted: 4 Sep 2021

See all articles by Gregory D. Saxton

Gregory D. Saxton

Schulich School of Business, York University

Charlotte Ren

Temple University - Fox School of Business and Management

Chao Guo

Penn School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania

Date Written: February 3, 2020

Abstract

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms – alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment.

Keywords: firm response, corporate social responsibility (CSR), social media, diffused stakeholders, connective power, urgency

Suggested Citation

Saxton, Gregory D. and Ren, Charlotte and Guo, Chao, Responding to Diffused Stakeholders on Social Media: Connective Power and Firm Reactions to CSR-related Twitter Messages (February 3, 2020). Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 172, pp. 229–252 (2021), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3903541

Gregory D. Saxton (Contact Author)

Schulich School of Business, York University ( email )

4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3
Canada

HOME PAGE: http://social-metrics.org

Charlotte Ren

Temple University - Fox School of Business and Management ( email )

Philadelphia, PA 19122
United States

Chao Guo

Penn School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania ( email )

Philadelphia, PA 19104-6214
United States

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