Framing of Opposing Corporate and Activist NGO Website Communications: Impacts on Perceptions of Tripartite Sustainability Values and Joining Online Networks

Michèle Paulin,Kaspar Schattke,Ronald J Ferguson

doi:10.13189/ujm.2019.070101

Abstract

This research investigated the impacts of the diverse framings of corporate and activist NGOs website communications of a proposed Canadian oil-sands pipeline on participants' perceptions of a) the tripartite sustainability values of environmental safety, economic benefits and community social relations and b) the willingness to join the corporate and activist NGOs online networks. Given the importance of sustainability issues in business education curricula and research, the participants were drawn from a population of undergraduate students. They were exposed online to either neutral information (control group), or randomly exposed initially to either the Corporate or Activist NGOs website communications. These exposures were subsequently reversed creating a combined group exposed to both agenda framings. Results demonstrated the persuasive power of both communication framings. The Corporate communication created positive perceptions of tripartite sustainability values, whereas the Activist NGOs' created negative perceptions. After exposures to the opposite communications, the Corporate group's perceptions changed from positive to negative, whereas the Activist NGOs perceptions only became somewhat less negative. Also there was a stronger willingness to join an Activist NGO rather than the corporate online action network. The empirical findings reflect the powerful diverse impacts of agenda framing on a highly controversial societal issue. Concerned citizens, researchers, politicians and academics should not restrict their website consultation to just one framing of such complex wicked issues. The present findings also have important implications for developing a more balanced and ethical business curriculum in the area of sustainability and common good.

Highlights

Corporate sustainability has developed over the past two decades into a legitimate sub-field of sustainability research for management and organization scholars (Hahn, Figge, Aragon-Correa & Sharma, 2017)
Impacts of framing Corporate and Activist NGOs website communications on the perceptions of the tripartite sustainability values: A three-step analytic strategy was applied to test the separate impacts of the Corporate (H1a) and Activist NGOs (H1b) website communications on the participants’ perceptions of the tripartite sustainability values of environmental safety, economic benefits and community relationships
Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was calculated in order to test for mean differences of the tripartite sustainability values as a whole

Summary

Introduction

Corporate sustainability has developed over the past two decades into a legitimate sub-field of sustainability research for management and organization scholars (Hahn, Figge, Aragon-Correa & Sharma, 2017). Communication research in sustainability science can investigate how diverse message framing of controversial issues can influence how people come to perceive and respond to these tripartite values of environmental, social, and economic sustainability (Smith, Suldovsky, and Lindenfeld (2016). Website communications employed in issues management by corporations and Framing of Opposing Corporate and Activist NGO Website Communications: Impacts on Perceptions of Tripartite Sustainability Values and Joining Online Networks activist NGOs have become virtually indistinguishable (2015), we investigated sustainability perceptions of new (Gauthier and Kappen, 2016). This is sometimes entrants to a business school. These Millennial students are effective in reaching mutual agreements, it often results in pertinent for this study given that they are extreme diverse positions on controversial issues involving digitally savvy, have a vested interested in the longer-term “wicked problems”. Coombs and Holladay (2018) citing impacts of sustainable corporate practices and will be Termeer et al (2013) describe these problems as difficult future leaders of for- and not-for-profit organizations

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