When: Wednesday, October 27, 2021, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PMWhere: Online, Zoom
The Accounting and Accountability Research Group seminar, will take place on Wednesday 27th October from 1pm-2pm, via Zoom.
This seminar is hosted by Claudine Grisard (School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London).
The presenter is Dr Giovana Michelon, from the University of Bristol.
Abstract
Social enterprises face a risk for which the pressure over financial sustainability “crowds out” their impact mission. Corporate governance arrangements can play an important role in managing the tensions between the two objectives, by steering and driving stakeholder engagement processes. At the same time, the rise of social media has provided firms with a platform for undertaking stakeholder engagement on a large scale. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine how the governance arrangements of social enterprises affect engagement with stakeholders in social media. Specifically, we identify three distinctive mechanisms for a governance approach to stakeholder engagement in social enterprises: the legal responsibility towards stakeholders, the embeddedness of ethical standards, and the adoption of non-financial mission policies. We argue that each of them matters for the extent to which social enterprises engage with stakeholders on social media, as well as the quality of this engagement. By scraping and classifying non-financial tweets posted by 1,074 U.S. B Corps between 2014 and 2018 and those posted by stakeholders towards the firm, we find that the legal and ethical mechanisms are positively related to the quality of engagement while the policy mechanism is positively related to both the extent and quality of engagement. Our study sheds light on the implications of governance mechanisms in steering social media stakeholder engagement in social enterprises.
Join Zoom Meeting https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/88372527963