Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility in mining industries

Abstract

The mining sector plays a fundamental role in the global economy since it provides vital raw materials and energy for a large number of industries but mining activities are commonly criticized due to the effects on workers’ health and local communities, and are seen as a threat to society in general. For these reasons, companies have to deal with the compatibility between the productive activity and the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Under this context, this paper aims to examine CSR communication in the mining sector on Twitter and identify the main topics of CSR and the main participants in the creation of content. A software framework has been developed 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. Twitter was chosen since it is one of the three most commonly used social network sites by mining companies for information sharing and stakeholder engagement. The data collection period was from February 2019 to December 2019 and it resulted in 2,000,000 Twitter posts. The results show the CSR debate is increasingly growing in developing countries and in countries with a bad reputation of environmental and health mining conditions. The debate is mainly centered on the impact of mining industries on the land, and many stakeholders advocate for more environmental responsibility since they consider that mining activities are still controversial.Also, results reveal that the mining sector should improve the CSR disclosure and adopt a stakeholder engagement strategy grounded in the corporate stakeholder relationship perspective, the two-way symmetrical communication, and the dialogic theory of public relations. Social network sites such as Twitter can lead to positive outcomes for companies since they are not only a way to advertise what the company does with regards to CSR, but also to receive input from other for their CSR activities.