Status of Corporate Sustainability: A Content Analysis of Fortune 500 Companies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2018

Department

School of Business

Abstract

n order to explore and extend our understanding of corporate sustainability definitions and frameworks, we performed a content analysis of a sample of (2013) Fortune 500 companies' standalone sustainability reports using the content analysis tool, Leximancer (http://leximancer.com). Leximancer is a powerful content analysis tool that performs both conceptual and thematic analysis. In addition, Leximancer displays the results of the analyses visually, thus providing a view of the conceptual and thematic structure of the text, and enabling a researcher to quantify and display the text structure. The results of our analyses demonstrate three common themes (Business, Employees and Energy/Environment) observable across eight of the nine industries in our sample. In addition, we observed significant differences in the relative emphasis for the three common themes across industries. We believe a deeper understanding of the themes that motivate firms' sustainability efforts can enhance future research that explores relationships between organizational sustainability efforts and organizational performance.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2195

First Page

1450

Last Page

1461

Volume

27

Issue

8

ISSN

10990836

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS