COLEDISO · Corporate Legitimacy in Digital Society: The Role of Citizens’ Judgments in Social Media

Corporate Legitimacy in Digital Society: The Role of Citizens’ Judgments in Social Media

New information and communication technologies have empowered wide parts of society to connect with each other and express their opinions on public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, also known as social media. Additional to political discussions, people use social media increasingly to evaluate corporations, their actions, services and products. Customers may express their excitement about the features of a new mobile phone or voice their frustration with a slow customer service. Particularly in crisis situations and during scandals, individuals raise their voices and express their discontent with certain businesses and their practices. On the other hand, citizens may support certain initiatives and practices by corporations that seem particularly in line with their values. These ongoing streams of online judgments can be interpreted as a broader conversation about the social acceptance – or legitimacy - of corporations, whereby social media offer each individual the possibility to express their own opinions, based on their individual values, expectations, and experiences. This project accesses and analyses these online conversations and judgments re corporations. By accessing millions of voices in social media, the project studies how corporations are judged and evaluated by a variety of individuals. The societal value of this research project lies in the acknowledgment and measurement of individual opinions at large scale, which gives a good indication for the societal judgment of corporations based on a variety of opinions and values. While research on corporate legitimacy has previously mainly used news media or accreditation bodies to assess the social acceptance of businesses, this research has a more democratic approach for the assessment of the social acceptance of corporations. Indeed, by analysing the multiplicity of voices for the judgment of corporations and their actions, this project takes into account the plurality of values, expectations, and experiences of individuals. The research project therefore gives a better understanding for the social acceptance of organizations, and how social judgments are built and influenced. The overall objective is to contribute to a better understanding of social judgment formation in the digital society. Step 1, the project will lay out the theoretical foundations and conceptualizations for social judgment formation that accounts for dynamics and contestation in a digital communication environment, where a multitude of actors contribute to the continuous construction of social judgment. Step 2, empirical analyses based on several million tweets will give insights into the actual social judgment formation of 30 corporations. Based on above, the project will produce >5 articles to address social judgment formation in relation to organizational actions and influence of traditional news media.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union