External stakeholder perspectives on aspirational CSR communication

The purpose of this thesis is to study aspirational corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication from the perspective of organization’s external stakeholders. In the study, aspirational CSR communication is defined as future-oriented, spoken and written announcements of the CSR visions and goals of an organization. The aim of the thesis is to understand better the external views on aspirational talk, which is relatively new concept and has previously been studied empirically mainly from managerial perspective, or only conceptually. More specifically, this thesis is interested in the perceptions Finnish environmental and development NGOs have regarding aspirational CSR communication. This research problem is addressed via two research questions, which are interested in the conditions of aspirational CSR communication that either increase or decrease the support of it among NGOs, and the perceived outcomes of such talk. The research is qualitative and empirical in nature. The empirical data consists of nine in-depth, one-on-one thematic interviews held with representatives of Finnish environmental and development NGOs between May and June 2020. The interview data was analysed using the thematic analysis method. The interpretation of the findings was guided by the theoretical framework, which consists of three streams of literature: CSR communication, stakeholder management, and aspirational talk. Three themes and nine subthemes were detected from the data which answer the first research question. The themes were conditions increasing support of aspirational CSR communication, conditions increasing rejection of aspirational CSR communication, and contextual factors which might affect the support regardless of the previous two conditions. Thus, the findings show that even though aspirations are expressed according to certain, mostly rhetorical conditions, the contextual factors might still evoke feelings of rejection or suspicion among the NGOs. The findings for the second research question in turn include two themes and nine subthemes, positive outcomes and negative outcomes of aspirational CSR communication. To simplify, it would seem that in most cases, aspirations expressed in proper rhetorical manner are seen to more likely result in positive outcomes, whereas aspirational talk considered misleading results in negative outcomes. The main contributions of the findings are threefold. First, the findings give us preliminary understanding of the general NGO perceptions of aspirational CSR communication, which have not been studied empirically before from this point of view. Second, the findings increase our understanding of the process of uttering aspirations and the realisation of them from the audience’s perspective, and specifically of the uptakes of aspirations and factors affecting them. Third, the findings shed more light to the connection of business-NGO relationship and aspirational CSR communication, and how the first can affect the perceptions of latter