Analysis of Twitter posts for evaluation of Corporate Social Responsibility in the leather industry

Abstract

Leather industry is facing the consequences of their historic lack of communication and now are under an increasing pressure to communicate their position and policies with regards to corporate social responsibility (CSR), informing consumers about the corporations’ good intentions and actions to recover clarity and be able to affirm without doubts that responsibly manufactured leather is sustainable. Under this context, this paper aims to examine CSR communication in the leather sector on Twitter identifying the main topics of CSR and the main participants in the creation of content and thus contribute to the development of CSR strategies for the leather industry. A software framework has been implemented in order to manage big text data in the study of CSR and sentiment computational content analysis to classify the tweets as positive, negative, or neutral. The results show that the general public associates leather with the environment, sustainability, and fashion. The general opinion about the leather industry’s CSR is rather neutral. Nonetheless, negative opinions occupy a close second place, and positive opinions are rare. Lastly, alternative bio-materials sneak in the industry reshaping the opinions to more positive ones.