The Legitimization of Ethically Questionable Business Practices via Self-Disclosure in Social Media  

Oleh:

Schoeneborn, Dennis ; Stettler, Roland ; Homberg, Fabian

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: The 2nd International CSR Communication Conference Aarhus, 18-20 September 2013), page 1-5.
Topik: Business ethics; “Communication constitute organizations” (CCO ) perspective; Corporate social responsibility; Petty corruption; Social media
Fulltext: The Legitimization of Ethically.pdf (81.62KB)

Isi artikel

Purpose In recent years, there has been a growing interest in studying the interplay between corporations and their stakeholders via social media (e.g., weblogs, Twitter, or Facebook; see Capriotti, 2011). In most cases, however, scholars have been interested in how societal constituents (like non-governmental organizations; NGO s) have facilitated social media to critically address ethically questionable business practices – and how corporations, in turn, have reacted with communication practices aimed at retaining their legitimacy (e.g. Etter and Fieseler, 2010; Rybalko and Seltzer, 2010; Schultz et al., 2011). Accordingly, previous research has been primarily focused on the external dimension of corporate communication activities in response to stakeholder demands via social media. In contrast to this, Schoeneborn and Trittin (2013) argue that communication is not only a means for corporations to achieve certain ends. Instead, more fundamentally, communication constitutes the organization as a legitimate collective entity. This view on orga¬nizations has also come to be called “communication constitutes organizations” or “CCO ” (e.g. Cooren et al., 2011). The CCO view implies to look how external and internal communication practices interact to jointly constitute the organization). Seen from this perspective, the question arises how social media by giving communicative visibility to certain organizational practices can foster the existence and perpetuation of such practices. In order to de-monstra¬te the CCO perspective’s usefulness in illuminating the constitutive effects of com¬mu¬ni¬ca¬tion via social media, we examine a particular case where a specific social media platform can actual¬ly be conducive of the very existence of an ethically business practice across various organizations. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, we study the website ‘Frontdesktip.com’ by investigating its capability to foster the institutionalization of an ethically questionable practice known as the “20$ Sandwich Trick” among hotels in Las Vegas. Frontdesktip.com is a social media website where users share experiences about how and where you can get an expensive hotel upgrade in Las Vegas for a comparably small ‘tip’. This money is paid at the front desk during the hotel check-in procedure. The idea is that guests put a 20$ bill between their ID or passport and their driving license. The guest hands over to the receptionist this “sandwich” and asks for a complementary upgrade. If the receptionist sees the money and understands its hidden meaning, he or she will typically try to give such an upgrade and/or will provide the guest with other valuable complementarities. Since this trick does not always work, users can write reviews about their attempts on this website and share information and tips, about where it is possible to get valuable room upgrades by applying the “Trick”. In order to empirically examine this case of “petty corruption” (Zweighaft, 2004), we have compiled a dataset of self-reports and success rates per hotel on the social media site Frontdesktip.com. These reports allow for rare insights into the recurrent performance of an ethically questionable business practice. Our study is guided by two questions: (1) which variables can best explain the “success” of the 20$ Trick; and (2) to what we can observe an increasing institutionalization of the “Trick”, as indicated by users’ narrative accounts which tend to legitimize the practice as a new ‘way of doing things’. Findings/contributions This empirical research is currently ongoing. Our study aims at contributing to two main strands of literature: First, by drawing on the CCO view, we add to existing works on CSR communication and social media by looking not only on the external dimension of communication but the interplay between (external) communicative visibility via social media and the institutionalization of (internal) business practices. Second, we contribute to research on the institutionalization of ethically questionable business practices and small-scale corruption, thus high¬lighting the co-constitutive effects of social media sites in this context.

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