Stakeholder representation in the CEO's letter to shareholders

Moran, Mark David

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

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

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Mark Moran

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