Abstract
The main aim of this paper is to analyse company sustainability disclosure in case of a legitimacy crisis. This work sets out to investigate how the negative externalities of an event reported widely in the media, such as the sinking of the Costa Concordia class cruise ship, have affected sustainability communication, for not only Carnival Corporation & PLC (the parent company of Costa) but also its most direct competitor Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. The paper relies on text analysis focusing on the sustainability reports of the two major companies (in terms of market share) in the cruise sector. Authors compared the reports of Carnival Corporation & PLC and its most direct competitor for a five-year period using text mining techniques. Results indicate that an event with social and environmental negative externalities, dominating international media and capable to bring discredit in the eyes of stakeholders, generates a change in the sustainability communication of both companies. Thus, repercussions are larger than one might suppose. Companies reduced the amount of information disclosed as a strategy to influence the perception of their audience, demonstrating that the provision of justifications, explanations and announcements of new sustainable policies (which increase the quantity of information) is not a predictable reaction. This paper undertakes empirical research on the sustainability reports of cruise line companies - which have been largely overlooked - and contributes to better understand company sustainability reporting praxis after an industrial disaster.
Highlights
The cruise sector is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic segments of the entire tourism and leisure travel market (Cruise Market Watch, 2015; Xiao Dong, Xiao Rong, & RESEARCH PAPERSustainability disclosure and a legitimacy crisis: Insights from two major cruise companies.Xue Gang, 2015)
This work aims to contribute to existing research using the case of a huge event with negative externalities and widely reported in the media, such as the sinking of the ship named Costa Concordia, to analyse possible changes occurred in the sustainability communication of its holding company Carnival Corporation & PLC (CCL) and its most direct competitor Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (RCL)
If we consider all the categories of the wordlist, we can see that in the five-year period considered, the average value for CCL (16.02%) is much higher than that of RCL (11.06%), even though the value recorded in the last year (13.16%) could lead us to think of a possible progressive decrease in this deviation
Summary
The cruise sector is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic segments of the entire tourism and leisure travel market (Cruise Market Watch, 2015; Xiao Dong, Xiao Rong, & RESEARCH PAPERSustainability disclosure and a legitimacy crisis: Insights from two major cruise companies.Xue Gang, 2015). The growth of the cruise sector (for example, the European cruise market grew from 3.4 million passengers in 2006 to 5.5 million passengers in 2010 according to CLIA Europe Statistics 2014) highlights a serious problem of sustainability in terms of negative environmental and social impact: the growing demands from new passengers requires the construction of increasingly large ships, which in turn have increasing impacts on the marine environment and the cruise destinations (Bonilla-Priego, Font, & Pacheco-Olivares, 2014; Brida & Zapata, 2009; Johnson, 2002; Klein, 2011; Wood, 2000). A negative pay-off is generated between the resources taken and the waste left, producing inefficiency in terms of sustainability. Additional social concerns relate to changes to indigenous value systems, traditional lifestyles and behaviours at ports of call, to food safety and health for passengers and to working conditions for crew members (Jones, Hillier, & Comfort, 2016)
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