Nils Gustafsson
elite networks, political communication & social media
“Toxic, but in a good way” : H&M in Russia during the Ukraine war as seen through consumer activism on TikTok
Författare
Summary, in English
H&M kept Russian stores open while the Ukrainian ones were closed immediately after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. H&M’s response caused an uproar on social media among stakeholders who urged a boycott of H&M and to target them via mail and other contacts. In March 2022, H&M suspended all sales in Russia in March, and in July 2022, H&M decided to leave Russia permanently.
Corporate political responsibility has been studied in general management, business ethics and political economy (Frynas & Stephens, 2015). Most existing studies thus take the organizational perspective and examine corporate intervention in socio-political issues for solving regulatory voids (e.g., Banerjee, 2008) or gaining their legitimacy (e.g., Crane, 2013).
While the existing studies have enlightened us about how corporate actors have engaged in public discussion regarding socio-political issues, we know relatively little about whether and how the public discussion would prompt corporations to rethink their political responsibility for an issue (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016).
To fill this gap, this study draws the insights from social movement studies and examines how consumer activists construct responsibility and moral engagement through which corporations may come to accept responsibility, especially political responsibility (Scherer et al., 2013).
We study corporate political responsibility as constructed through consumer activism on the short-form video hosting site TikTok, as it is one of the most widely used social media services among young people globally (Iqbal, 2020). TikTok videos containing relevant keywords and hashtags such as #H&M + #Russia, #russiainukraine, etc, and posted during 2022 are downloaded. We then employ content analysis to study video, video text, sound, hashtags, caption and comments to interpret the meaning and interaction around each post.
This study contributes by: (1) bridging insights from social movement studies and corporate political responsibility studies to explain how consumer activism contributes to corporate political responsibilization for a geopolitical issue; (2) exploring the emerging role of short videos as political communication in constructing corporate political responsibility for a socio-political issue.
References:
Banerjee, S. B. (2008). Corporate social responsibility: The good, the bad and the ugly. Critical sociology, 34(1), 51-79.
Avdelning/ar
- Institutionen för strategisk kommunikation
Publiceringsår
2023-08-18
Språk
Engelska
Dokumenttyp
Konferensbidrag: abstract
Nyckelord
- tiktok
- consumer activism
- social movemen
- corporate social
- corporate political responsibility
- social media activism
- Ukraine invasion 2022
Conference name
NordMedia Conference 2023
Conference date
2023-08-16 - 2023-08-18
Conference place
Bergen, Norway
Status
Unpublished
Projekt
- Social Information and Hybrid Power: A Strategic Platform for Political Communication at Lund University
- Crisis Inequalities and Social Resilience (CISR)