Online courses in business subjects, focusing on CSR, business and society, and business ethics, as well as sustainability topics in other areas of the business curriculum, can benefit from new resources drawn from other types of education. Examples are presented of how these conventional technologies can be supplemented using examples from outside the usual business curriculum.

Learning under uncertain circumstances from all potential outcomes is an underresearched phenomenon. The concept of intelligent failure (Sitkin, 1992, McGrath, 2001), or good failure (Edmondson, 2023) tell us that certain lessons can only be learned when things seamingly go wrong. But how individuals behave under uncertain circumstances, how they make sense of these circumstances (Weick, 1995) and how they influence each other in the context of their team, is a missing link in the academic conversation that this ethnographic study aims to contribute to.

Economic inequalities, one of the defining issues of our contemporary societies, have been increasingly growing over the last four decades. The economies of many countries have produced progressively unequal outcomes in terms of earned income and accumulated wealth, leaving populations to suffer worsening socioeconomic problems. Although progressive taxation appears to be an effective mechanism for reducing inequalities, tax noncompliance among taxpayers and organizations remains prevalent. If coercive measures have traditionally been the focus for understanding individual and collective behaviors related to tax compliance, the limitations of standard economic models in predicting actual outcomes have prompted a shift toward examining public policies through theoretical lenses derived from psychology. However, understanding the psychological mechanisms influencing one’s motivation to pay taxes remains limited. To address this gap, this project aims to understand the motivational processes leading individuals and organizations to adopt (or not to adopt) tax compliant behaviors in order to act upon the satisfaction and frustration of psychological needs that promote tax compliance and, consequently, the reduction of inequalities. By proposing a measuring scale of Motivation to pay taxes and investigating how the satisfaction and frustration of psychological needs can enhance taxpayers' motivation to meet their fiscal responsibilities, this paper proposes actionable solutions to help reduce economic inequalities. In other words, by understanding how tax policies can satisfy or frustrate psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness, this project has the potential to provide concrete tools for state authorities in transforming public policies that value a fair redistribution of ressources.

In recent years, companies have increasingly taken public stances on divisive socio-political issues such as racial inequality, human rights, and climate policy (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Burbano, 2021; Gulbrandsen, Just, & Uldam, 2022; Olkkonen & Morsing, 2023; Villagra, Montfort, & Méndez-Suárez, 2021). These public stances have been conceptualized as a form of corporate activism—an activity by which companies put themselves in divisive debates that often do not relate to their core business or the environmental and societal impacts of their actions (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). The element of a ‘stance’ has been central in the emerging conceptualizations of corporate activism or related concepts that place companies as proactive actors in divisive debates (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Burbano, 2021). Stances are linguistic patterns that reveal how an actor taking a stance projects themselves into a discourse (Hyland & Jiang, 2016).

Recent empirical work on stance-taking among Nordic companies on social media reveals how different stance-taking styles are key to understanding how companies position themselves in socio-political debate (Olkkonen, Laaksonen & Van den Broek, 2023). It highlights that stances differ in the amount of evidence presented on the divisive issue, the degree of emotional expression, and the extent to which the company demonstrates its own involvement in the stance. Yet, many open questions remain about how companies position themselves with certain stance styles, and how stance styles may vary along the types of issues. With this study, we contribute to these gaps by answering the following questions: “How do companies cluster around stance styles, and how do these stance styles vary across different types of issues?” In this way, we aim to introduce and identify distinctive stance roles, a pattern of stance-taking behavior that positions companies among peers.

To answer this question, we build on an existing dataset of how the 600 largest companies in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden engage with socio-political issues on social media, specifically Twitter. The dataset consists of over one million tweets from 2018 to 2020 from 348 active company accounts. We have filtered the data to focus on social equality issues, with 3,059 tweets about subtopics such as social justice, diversity, inclusivity, discrimination, gender equality, immigration, racism and LGBTQ+ rights. In our previous study, we employed a deductive approach to identify 1,326 tweets from 193 companies with a stance on social equality, and an abductive approach to identify and discuss distinctive stance styles. The proposed study builds on this dataset and ongoing analysis by using multiple correspondence analysis to 1) cluster the companies and their centrality on the stance styles they use throughout the full period to identify stance roles, 2) compare this clustering between 2018-2020 to see how companies change in their stance role, 3) cluster social equality subtopics on stance styles used by companies. We will use country, company type and industry as separate background variables in the visualizations.

The findings of the correspondence analysis will provide insights into stance roles among the companies, how roles change over time (following a trajectory), and how the type of subtopic is related to stance styles. With our study, we may better understand how stance styles are used by companies as an instrument to position themselves on divisive issues. Future research may use these stance roles to explain the effectiveness and social evaluation (e.g. authenticity, social approval, or reputation) of CSR communication.

References

Bhagwat, Y., Warren, N. L., Beck, J. T., & Watson, G. F. (2020). Corporate Sociopolitical Activism and Firm Value. Journal of Marketing, 84(5), 1–21.

Burbano, V. C. (2021). The Demotivating Effects of Communicating a Social-Political Stance: Field Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market Platform. Management Science, 67(2), 1004–1025.

Chatterji, A. K., & Toffel, M. W. (2019). Assessing the impact of CEO activism. Organization & Environment, 32(2), 159–185.

Gulbrandsen, I. T., Just, S. N., & Uldam, J. (2022). S(t)imulating resistance: Corporate responses to the Trump presidency. Organization, 29(1), 106–128.

Hambrick, D. C., & Wowak, A. J. (2021). CEO sociopolitical activism: A stakeholder alignment model. Academy of Management Review, 46(1). 33-59.

Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173-192.

Olkkonen, L., Laaksonen, S. M., & van den Broek, T. (2023). The rhetoric of corporate stances: How companies talk about divisive socio-political issues and motivate collective action on social media. In European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) Conference, Cagliari, Italy.

Olkkonen, L. & Morsing, M. (2023). A processual model of CEO activism: Activities, frames, and phases. Business & Society, 62(3), 646-694.

Villagra, N., Monfort, A., & Méndez-Suárez, M. (2021). Firm value impact of corporate activism: Facebook and the stop hate for profit campaign. Journal of Business Research, 137, 319–326.