Abstract
Corporations have embraced the idea of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) under the general framework of sustainability. Studies have measured and analyzed the impact of internal sustainability efforts on the performance of individual companies, policies, and projects. This exploratory study attempts to extract useful insight from shareholder sustainability resolutions using machine learning-based text analytics. Prior research has studied corporate sustainability disclosures from public reports. By studying shareholder resolutions, we gain insight into the shareholders’ perspectives and objectives. The primary source for this study is the Ceres sustainability shareholder resolution database, with 1737 records spanning 2009–2019. The study utilizes a combination of text analytic approaches (i.e., word cloud, co-occurrence, row-similarities, clustering, classification, etc.) to extract insights. These are novel methods of transforming textual data into useful knowledge about corporate sustainability endeavors. This study demonstrates that stakeholders, such as shareholders, can influence corporate sustainability via resolutions. The incorporation of text analytic techniques offers insight to researchers who study vast collections of unstructured bodies of text, improving the understanding of shareholder resolutions and reaching a wider audience.
Highlights
Environmental and climate change trends, as well as a general concern about the environment and environmental impact of business operations, have provoked public demand for corporate accountability and transparency [1,2,3,4]
Corporate sustainability encompasses a range of aspects, among them: Corporate reputation, sustenance and expansion of economic growth, customer relationships, shareholder value, prestige, and the quality of products and services [12]; implementing and demonstrating social and environmental concerns in business transactions [13]; satisfying the current needs of stakeholders without compromising the capability to meet the needs of the future [14]; and demonstrating the ability to avail opportunities and manage risk in terms of economic, environmental, and social dimensions, so as to create long-term shareholder value [15]
This study looks at corporate sustainability from the lens of the shareholder
Summary
Environmental and climate change trends, as well as a general concern about the environment and environmental impact of business operations, have provoked public demand for corporate accountability and transparency [1,2,3,4]. In light of such pressure, companies are moving sustainability to the top of the corporate agenda [5,6,7,8]. Despite the multiplicity of definitions, the common thread is an underlying corporate commitment to sustainable economic development and improved quality of life for employees, the community, and society [16]
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