Anna Heikkinen

Corporate Responsibility in Communication: Empirical Analysis of Press Releases in a Conflict

The paper examines how the tensions of corporate responsibility are articulated and reconciled in a controversial situation of a foreign investment. We conducted a conventionalist analysis on the company press releases in a case where a Finnish forest industry company invested in a pulp mill in South America. The findings show that the use of language in press releases mobilizes certain stakeholders while reassuring others, and that the argumentation used creates value-neutral communication, making it possible to pursue strategic goals despite competing values. For teaching, we provide insights on how to communicate in a conflict situation.

Managing stakeholder dialogue: the case of Botnia in Uruguay

Stakeholder dialogue is an effective way for a company to enhance its sensitivity to the operational environment and to increase stakeholders’ understandings of the dilemmas facing the company. An open and transparent dialogue process can create fertile ground for solving tensions in stakeholder relations. However, the process is not always straightforward. This article presents a case where a Finnish forest industry company’s decision to build a pulp mill in Uruguay raised both opposing and supporting views among the local interest groups. The company faced the challenge of how to engage with the hostile, opposing groups in order to ensure their operations in Uruguay. By engaging in this case, students will deepen their understanding of the multitude of stakeholder interests and learn to facilitate a dialogue that seeks to find solutions and avoid conflict in a situation of a stakeholder dispute.

Managing Biodiversity Through Stakeholder Involvement: Why, Who and for What Initiatives?

Biodiversity, a key component of sustainability, is increasingly gaining attention in business organisations. In relation to biodiversity and other sustainability issues, stakeholders are often dis...

Business Climate Change Engagement: Stakeholder Collaboration in Multi-stakeholder Networks

This article focuses on sustainability management and climate change engagement through stakeholder collaboration. Addressing climate change requires collaboration among various stakeholders from businesses, governments, and civil society. This article examines a multi-stakeholder network aiming to generate innovative approaches to climate change. The life cycle model of multi-stakeholder networks is utilized to examine how stakeholder collaboration is used to define and plan for climate change engagement in business organizations. The findings suggest that informal and open-ended networks provide significant benefits by fostering learning and innovation when striving to address complex sustainability issues. This article concludes that because sustainability management is a delicate issue, an open-ended network may serve not only to reveal and enhance the particular sustainability interest of different participants but also to create joint interest. In turn, this may promote engagement with complex sustainability issues and sustainable value creation to all involved stakeholders.

Ethics in Everyday Organizational Life: Conforming to the Norms and Breaking the Rules

In this study, we examine ethics in an organizational context by approaching ethics from the ethics as practice viewpoint, as a discursively constructed phenomenon. Many organizations emphasize the importance of ethics, but acting ethically is not always a simple matter. This perspective allows us to consider the fragmented and contested nature of organizational ethics. We focus empirically on two specialist organizations that do not have a formalized code of ethics. We use discourse analysis to examine instances of everyday organizational life where ethical issues surface. More specifically, we examine how ethical rules are constructed in everyday situations and how following or breaching these rules is made meaningful. The findings suggest that ethicality in the specialist organizations crystalizes in following or obeying different rules existing in the organization, even if the specialist organizations did not have an official ethical code. This study contributes to the understanding of ethics as pract...

How Constructions of the Future Shape Organizational Responses: Climate Change and the Canadian Oil Sands

the west/non-west forms of accountability using the concept of hybridity as a liminal space where translations take place. Subjecting these seemingly polar accountabilities to possible hybridity scrutiny might be challenging, unless, in my opinion, an ethnographic approach (like Dar’s) is utilised. Nonetheless, this could be explored in the context of corporate-stakeholder engagement. Whereas formal reports/accounts and engagement differ, engagement provides (as Dar’s study also shows) an avenue for the researcher to assess how power asymmetry plays out in engagement between corporations and their stakeholders, an evidence usually obscured by formal accounts as such action or evidence, borrowing the words of Dar, is ‘“lost in translation” in written accounts’ (p. 140).