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Part B – Methodology and Analysis
66 Chapter 3
3. Methodology
The following section will be dedicated to the real scope of this study, namely to the analysis of Tetra Pak online CSR communication in order to find out what the main recurrent themes of Tetra Pak CSR communication are and how they are linguistically framed in its Sustainability reports, over the website and on the Facebook and Unfold-blog pages.
Key theories to give a theoretical background of the field of CSR were provided in the previous chapters: among others Carroll’s CSR pyramid (1991) explaining what responsibilities CSR includes and Paine’s model for why companies engage in CSR (2003).
The analysis will start off with a qualitative analysis based on Cornelissen’s Stakeholder Salience Model (2011), aiming at identifying Tetra Pak’s main stakeholders, how large an influence these might have, and how their expectations are met in Tetra Pak’s online CSR communication.
The central analysis will be based on Du, Bhattacharya and Sen’s Framework for Effective CSR Communication (2010), which elaborates on factors that influence the effectiveness of CSR communication. These factors, including elements such as commitment, motivation, message channel and stakeholder characteristics will be applied to the analysis of Tetra Pak’s integrated Sustainability and Financial Reports as well as to Tetra Pak’s websites subdirectories and Tetra Pak’s Facebook and Unfold-blog texts. Furthermore, a quantitative analysis will be conducted on the aforementioned reports and texts that have been collected and organized in a corpus.
67 3.1. Choice of Case Study
After reaching out to different companies and upon careful consideration based on availability of data and the prominence of society-oriented themes in its corporate communication, Tetra Pak was chosen as a case study. Not only is Tetra Pak the market leader in the beverage and food packaging and processing industry but also at the forefront when it comes to implementing a coherent CSR strategy. Tetra Pak is constantly innovating new sustainable packaging solutions and renewable materials. Furthermore, the company is raising awareness about recycling in the general public by implementing recycling campaigns in Sweden, Brazil and China among others. As a result, it can be justified that significant social and environmental consequences derive from Tetra Pak’s CSR campaigns, and therefore Tetra Pak greatly serves the purpose of analyzing how it manages to create shared value across the entire value chain for different stakeholders and at the same time how, linguistically speaking, it succeeds in successfully communicating its business core values and its wholehearted commitment to acting responsibly by keeping faith to its motto: “Protects what’s good”.
Nonetheless this study has certain limitations: the conclusions of this dissertation will not represent Tetra Pak’s general CSR communication, as, due to time and page constraints it focuses only on few of the many possible communication channels, namely the corporate global website with the published CSR reports and the Facebook page, and only through one theoretical perspective. There has been no contact to the case company, and the analysis conducted is based on secondary sources. Moreover the thesis is mainly based on the sender’s point of view, and though it could have included a reception analysis this did not seem to fall completely within its scope.
Similarly, although many localized versions of the company’s websites are available; this thesis has only concentrated on an international and global dimension of Tetra Pak’s communication, thus failing to give variety in terms of geography to the study.
68 3.2. Research purpose
This study has the aim of pursuing the following related but independent lines of investigations:
1) try to identify and describe the way in which CSR-related themes are framed in relation to Tetra Pak’s core values, and how they are strategically deployed by the company to strike the perfect balance between gaining profits and building a strong reputation and image towards its stakeholders.
2) to focus on selected lexical and syntactic features, in an attempt to determine how those CSR-related themes are linguistically framed.
As can be drawn from the research questions, the appropriate research strategy for this thesis is that of the case study, as the thesis focuses on one specific case, in one specific way, or, as Yin (2003) explains: a case study is the most appropriate research strategy when “a “how” or “why” question is being asked about a “contemporary set of events, over which the investigator has little or no control” (Yin 2003:9).
69 3.3. Research Approach
Two types of research approaches are commonly mentioned in the literature, quantitative and qualitative research. Whereas quantitative research is concerned with a high quantity sample of numbers (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012: 25), qualitative research is interested in an inductive view of the relationship between theory and research “holding an epistemological position which is interpretative in nature and a constructionist stance, which implies that social properties are outcomes of the interactions between individuals” (Bryman & Bell, 2011:380).
As can be seen from the research questions upon which this thesis is built, this study focuses on how the sender, Tetra Pak, communicates its CSR activities through its CSR reports and its online communication in general and how this communication is linguistically framed. What can be derived from this is that the main emphasis is on how the sender constructs the text, thus the receivers’
interpretation of the text is not the main focus, as the thesis analyzes the content rather than the reception of it.
As such, the first part of the investigation draws on a discourse analytic approach, it is mainly qualitative and aims to identify and analyze nodal points in the integrated Sustainability and Financial reports which are specifically devoted to framing the relationship between CSR and business objectives. Reference to the scientific method of methodological hermeneutics5 (Palmer, 1969), whose main objective is to understand through interpretation, is also made. Palmer explains the hermeneutic circle in this way:
“Understanding is basically referential operation; we understand something by comparing it to something we already know. What we understand forms itself into systematic unities, or circles made up of parts. The circle as a whole defines the individual parts, and the parts together form the circle” (Palmer, 1969: 87). Thus,
5 The general hermeneutic beliefs are based on the ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who created modern hermeneutics based on his interest in understanding texts through understanding the intentions, emotions and thoughts of the author in the moment of expression, which Schleiermacher considered the one true meaning of the text. In order for a text to be fully understood, Schleiermacher believed that it should be analyzed both grammatically and psychologically, i.e. the language and the context as well as the background of the author should be understood (Sherratt, 2005).
70 by analyzing parts of a text and continuingly relating it to the whole, the parts and the whole give meaning to each other and thus form a circular form of understanding (Palmer, 1969).
The second part of the research, on the other hand, draws on a quantitative approach which focuses on gathering numerical data through polls, questionnaires or by manipulating pre-existing data using computational techniques and generalizing it to explain a particular phenomenon.
Specifically, a corpus-linguistic approach will be adopted in this study, as the analysis will take its move from quantitative data extracted from 3 corpora (details of which are provided in section 3.5).
Following this approach the analysis will be carried out by means of a specialized software program which is specifically designed to help investigate targeted language occurrences and to extract relevant information among huge data samples. The corpora under investigation, in fact, will be analyzed relying upon automated interrogation routines performed with the freeware corpus analysis toolkit AntConc (described in section 3.5.) in order to investigate the lexical make-up of the CSR reports and to uncover recurrent lexico-grammatical features and syntactic patterns which may be peculiar to this specific type of communication.
3.4. Tools
The first part of the qualitative analysis of CSR reports will be based on Cornelissen’s Stakeholder Salience Model (section 5.1), which suggests grouping stakeholders based on their salience to the particular organization. According to this model, the importance of a particular stakeholder is judged examining three dimensions: power, legitimacy and urgency.
Power is defined as the ability to impact organization to do something it would not do otherwise; legitimacy refers to possible claims laid upon the organization by the stakeholder group and urgency represents the degree to which stakeholder claims would require immediate action and response.
71 Using this model Tetra Pak’s main stakeholder groups will be listed and identified, then, by scrutinizing and extracting examples from the sustainability reports and the texts retrieved from Tetra Pak’s website and Facebook page, it will be investigated what kind of influence they exert over the organization and if their need and expectations are met.
The central analysis of Tetra Pak’s communication of its CSR engagement will be based on Tetra Pak’s publically available integrated Sustainability and Financial reports (2013-2016). The research questions will be addressed through a content analysis based on Du et al.’s Framework for Effective CSR Communication (section 5.2), which goes into depth with the factors that influence the effectiveness of CSR messages (see figure 6 below).
Figure 6A framework of CSR communication (Du et al., 2010:11)
Du et al.’s framework is based on extensive reviews and synthesis of existing research and literature within the field of CSR, and it seeks to give managers a deeper understanding of key issues related to the effectiveness of CSR communication.
This thesis will go into the elements in the left box of the model, looking at what elements of the message content Tetra Pak emphasizes in the sustainability reports, over the website and on its Facebook page and blog respectively. Moreover, the company’s stance towards CSR commitment, impact, motives and fit will be inspected by means of examples retrieved from the reports
72 and the website. Finally, the message channels through which the communication takes place will be taken into account focusing on the prominence given by the company to the CSR reports as its preferred communication medium.
The box on the right of the model will not be analyzed as such, because, as stated above, it lies beyond the scope of this study to focus on what outcome the messages conveyed by the company through its communicative instruments produce on the recipients.
As far as the quantitative analysis is concerned, a corpus-based approach was followed. For the purposes of the analysis, in fact, all the Sustainability and Financial reports (which are jointly issued by the company within a single document) published between 2013 and 2016 were collected in electronic format and organized in a corpus, details of which are reported in Table 2 below.
2013 2014 2015 2016 Total
Tokens 40,923 36,091 26,020 18,677 121,711
Pages 90 83 73 38 284
Table 2 Integrated Sustainability and Financial reports – Corpus composition
Two further small corpora were also collected for the purpose of comparison. The first one contains documents retrieved from Tetra Pak’s website, including texts taken from the subdirectories: Sustainability and About Tetra Pak.
The second small corpus, on the other hand, includes articles published on Tetra Pak’s official Facebook page from January 2016 to July 2016 and articles posted on Tetra Pak’s Unfold-blog from January 2016 to July 2016. The statistics for the Facebook articles and the blog Unfold articles are shown in Tables 3 and 4.
Website texts Total
Tokens 8,407 8,407
Pages 30 30
Table 3 Corporate website texts – Corpus Composition
73 Facebook articles Unfold Blog articles Total
Tokens 9,807 11,939 21,746
Pages 27 30 57
Table 4 Facebook articles and Unfold Blog articles – Corpus composition
The set of collected texts have been processed with the help of AntConc, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit developed by Laurence Anthony of Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. This software includes seven tools: the Concordance Tool, the Concordance plot tool, the File View Tool, the Clusters/N-Grams, the Collocates and the Wordlist/ Keywordlist tool.
The Concordance tool has a wide range of features, it allows searching string of characters, words, or phrases and results are shown in a 'KWIC' (KeyWord In Context) format, that is to say the program will automatically show the search term hit in the original context.
The Concordance Plot Tool shows search results plotted as a 'barcode' format, allowing the users to see the position where search results appear in target texts.
The File View Tool, on the other hand, is used to display the search term in the original file but it can also be used independently to search for any substring, word, phrase or regular expression in a target file, offering the user a very powerful text search engine.
Multi-word units can be investigated using the Clusters/N-Grams which displays clusters of words that surround a search term and orders them alphabetically or by frequency. The N-Grams Tool, on the other hand, scans the entire corpus for 'N' (e.g. 1 word, 2 words …) length clusters and allows the users to find common expressions within the corpus.
The function Collocates shows the collocates of a search term and allows to investigate non-sequential patterns in language.
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The Word List function counts all the words in the corpus and presents them in an ordered list allowing the users to quickly find which words are the most frequent in a corpus.
The Keyword List shows which words are unusually frequent (or infrequent) in the corpus in comparison with the words in a reference corpus allowing to identify peculiar words in the corpus.
For the purpose of this study only the functions wordlist, keyword list, concordance and collocates have been used to investigate the collected texts.
More specifically, a keyword list for the three different corpora has been extracted just to see what the key areas around which Tetra Pak’s communication is constructed are. The function Wordlist, on the other hand, has been used to generate wordlists for the three corpora and to highlight which are the most frequent words for every single corpus and how their distribution differs within corpora. After carefully scrutinizing the most frequent words, particularly meaningful lexical items have been concordanced and their linguistic co-text inspected to see if any regularity could be found across the corpora and try to gain meaningful insights on how the company linguistically frames its commitment to CSR principles.
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