”Responsible Business in the Blogosphere”

”Responsible Business in the Blogosphere”

The purpose of the three-year project is to examine how the reputation of companies as a “responsible business” is constructed online in virtual social networks.

The research project will analyse the socio-economic value of such virtual constructions of “responsible business”. This means perceptions of corporate economic, social, and environmental responsibility – what is referred to as ethical capital. The project will develop new methods of measurement that include online users’ creation of the companies’ reputation, which affects the value creation of the companies.

CSR and online communication

A reputation as a “responsible business” is a key managerial concern when it comes to a company's value creation. Increasingly, the creation of such corporate reputations emerges in virtual networks and communities that allows for a complexity of viral dynamics, interactivity, and co-production of messages and opinions. The Forrester Research Report documents how Web 2.0 tools such as widgets, Wikis, and blogs are growing faster than ever. They are expected to grow even faster in the immediate future vis-à-vis offline communication.

For instance, Apple did not anticipate that consumers were going to mobilise a “Green my Macintosh” online-supported campaign, which demanded that the company should live up to values linked to environmental sustainability that it never claimed to do in the first place.

In the same way, Arla Foods did not foresee the melamine-scandal in their joint venture with China and was unprepared for the crisis, although bloggers online had debated and warned about melamine in Chinese products in the weeks before the crisis became public. The dynamics of online communication becomes a powerful and independent source of reputation and value creation for companies, but also an unpredictable and not easily controllable source.

A cooperation between CBS and the Technical University of Denmark

The project is based on the hypothesis that online communication processes, though autonomous, are not necessarily unpredictable, and that these online communication processes exhibit regular patterns that are possible to identify by means of socio-economic case studies, linguistic analyses, data-mining, and mathematical modelling. Against this background, the project will contribute to the development of new methods of measuring the value of online communication in the development of ethical capital.

“Responsible Business in the Blogosphere” has the official research title: “Measurement Systems for Ethical Capital in the Experience Economy. Socio-Economic Value of Online Communication”.

Who’s behind?

Professor Mette Morsing, CBS Center for Corporate Social Responsibility, is responsible for this project. Morsing will coduct the project in cooperation with Associate Professors Adam Arvidsson, (IKL and University of Milan) and Kai Hockerts, CBS Center for Corporate Social Responsibility, Professor Lars Kai Hansen, and Associate Professor Finn Årup Nielsen from the Technical University of Denmark. Two Postdocs and four research degree students will be recruited during the spring of 2009, and the project will formally start on 1 August 2009.

The strategic and practical anchoring is in cooperation with Actics, Deloitte, and Publicis/REPUTATION