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An online social movement process in the context of a CSR initiative : organizational capacity, affecting the crowd and MNCS' CSR decision makers.

Jurriens, O.A. (2017) An online social movement process in the context of a CSR initiative : organizational capacity, affecting the crowd and MNCS' CSR decision makers.

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Abstract:Nowadays, the increasing importance of corporate social responsibility, also referred to as CSR can be recognized. Increasingly, MNCs act on this CSR trend and make CSR budget available to invest in CSR initiatives on the market. Therefore, many innovative firms want to exploit this opportunity and take advantage of it and therefore come up with an innovative new CSR initiative they want to implement or sell on the market. One interesting subtle way in today’s competitive arena which might be used by organizations to reach a certain goal of social institutional change is by a so called social movement with collective action (Rama, Milano, Salas & Liu, 2009). In a social movement, organizations together with individuals of the crowd, can put pressure and challenge and broaden the interests of business decision makers of MNCs to trigger them to invest in the CSR initiative (Den Hond & de Bakker, 2007). These organizations initiating a social movement around a CSR initiative, should mobilize individuals of this crowd. To do so, these organizations are forced to act on the digital revolution going on and use new types of media for a social movement, with social media in specific (Hitt, Ireland, Camp and Sexton, 2001). In addition, next to this online way to indirectly reach business decision makers to invest in the initiative, literature moreover states that it is important that the organization creates internal organizational capacity as well. Therefore, the aim of this research is to provide insight in the way a social movement process around a new CSR initiative evolves by looking in an integrated manner to the internal organizational process, while trying to affect individuals of the crowd by use of social media to get them engaged and indirectly affecting MNCs business decision makers to invest in a new CSR initiative. To investigate this a real life case process study has been executed from which the internal organizational process around the initiated social movement has been analyzed from a strategic entrepreneurial perspective, the online social movement has been analyzed by looking at social media engagement numbers and finally the business decision makers side has been analyzed by conducting interviews with CSR managers who are the ones able to invest in the CSR initiative in question. By doing so, the findings of this research contribute to theory and certain gaps can be filled. This research enriches the social movement literature in the context of a CSR initiative in which advocacy and support are central focus instead of protest actions of this crowd which is the focus in many available researches. In addition, the scarce academic literature available on the CSR decision makers is enriched with the findings of this research and the specific finding that these CSR decision makers do not perceive the influence of the crowd as leading compared to what is stated in many researches. Concerning the strategic entrepreneurship part of this research to analyze this social movement process around the CSR initiative in question, the findings mostly correspond with literature in the sense that dimensions of strategic entrepreneurship should be present to make progress in a social movement process.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Clients:
1994, Nederland
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/71836
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