University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Stakeholder representation in the CEO's letter to shareholders

Moran, Mark David

Content Files
MORAN-DISSERTATION-2024.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124143

Description

Title
Stakeholder representation in the CEO's letter to shareholders
Author(s)
Moran, Mark David
Issue Date
2024-03-01
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Downie, Stephen
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Downie, Stephen
Committee Member(s)
  • Elliott, Brooke
  • Yao, Mike
  • MacDonald, Jon
Department of Study
Illinois Informatics Institute
Discipline
Informatics
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Stakeholder Theory
  • Text-Mining
  • CEO’s Letter to Shareholders
  • Corporate Social Performance
  • Dialogic Communication
  • Context Collapse
  • Impression Management
Abstract
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.
Graduation Semester
2024-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Handle URL
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124143
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2024 Mark Moran

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