Stakeholder representation in the CEO's letter to shareholders

This research uses text mining and natural language processing to explore phenomena related to stakeholder representation in a proprietary corpus of over 3,000 CEO’s letters to shareholders from the annual reports of S&P 500 companies from 2005 to 2019. First, it establishes a set of terms for each stakeholder group, and measures changes in stakeholder representation in the CEO’s letter to shareholders. Next, it explores the relationship of stakeholder representation to corporate social performance and to CEO demographic traits. Further, it tests for evidence of dialogic communication toward stakeholder groups. Lastly, it looks for evidence of context collapse by testing for changes in what is said, how much is said, and how it is said. The research expands the small body of literature focused on stakeholders in the CEO’s letter to shareholders and in doing so provides an additional way to understand impression management in the CEO’s letter by considering context collapse. The research finds that stakeholder representation in the CEO’s letter has increased in absolute and relative terms. It finds evidence for a relationship between corporate social performance and stakeholder representation, but no evidence of a relationship between CEO demographic traits and stakeholder representation. It finds limited evidence of improved dialogic communication toward stakeholders. It finds evidence of context collapse. Further, it finds that social stakeholder groups (community, employee, environment) are the fastest growing in the letter, and that the supplier group may be declining.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Informatics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Moran, Mark David

Contributors dc:contributor

• Downie, Stephen
• Elliott, Brooke
• Yao, Mike
• MacDonald, Jon

• Stakeholder Theory
• Text-mining
• Ceo’s Letter To Shareholders
• Corporate Social Performance
• Dialogic Communication
• Context Collapse
• Impression Management

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Mark Moran

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124200

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124200