Eventi del

21 2019 12:30 - 14:00
Meeting room 4E4SR03 - Via Roentgen, 1

Bad News, Now What? Corporate Social Irresponsibility, Media Coverage and Attention

Olga Hawn (UNC Kenan - Flager Business School)

Firms around the world face growing pressures on a variety of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, oftentimes through severe negative media coverage. How do they respond to bad news – and the underlying ESG challenges – and which issues do they decide to focus on and why? We argue it depends on issue coverage by the media and severity of the criticism, moderated by prior attention paid to a focal issue (i.e., issue salience), stakeholder salience and slack resources. In particular, firms’ attention to ESG issues (i.e., issue salience before the negative news) activated by the media (i.e., via issue coverage and criticism) with wider reach (i.e., stakeholder salience) generates the most substantive response to the issue, particularly if firms possess slack resources. We test our arguments in a large quantitative study including almost 3,000 firms from 2007-2016. We contribute to the strategic CSR literature and attention-based view of the firm.