Research Insights

People Protesting with Sign Planet over Profit

Does Corporate Social Responsibility Communication Assuage Activists More Than Other People?

Popular culture and management scholars argue that activists serve as the watchdog for corporations. In the absence of government regulation, activists supposedly hold corporations to account. Corporate activists are more informed and, therefore, more skeptical about corporate social responsibility messages than the general public. Activists, the theory goes, can sniff out greenwashing in ways that the average citizen cannot. But, no studies had empirically examined whether activists were more skeptical

Does the CSR Message Matter? Untangling the Relationship Between Corporate–Nonprofit Partnerships, Created Fit Messages, and Activist Evaluations

View the Resource By Reyhaneh Maktoufi, Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate This study unpacks the complex relationship between corporate–nonprofit partnerships, corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, and stakeholder evaluations of fit. We move beyond the fundamental question of whether partner fit matters to questions about what types of messages matter, under what conditions, and to whom. We conducted an online experiment (N = 966) to test created fit messages’ ability to influence

Exploring Stakeholders’ Assessments of Organizational Identity and Identification in the Context of CSR Partnerships

View the Resource By Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate, Rong Wang Using an experimental design with non-fictitious organizations, we examine how stakeholders (N = 845) describe corporations and nonprofits. We interrogate the types of words stakeholders include in their mind maps of corporations and nonprofits prior to receiving information about a partnership. Descriptive results indicate that nonprofits received more concepts than corporations the three most popular categories were product or service,

How Does NGO Partnering Change Over Time? A Longitudinal Examination of Factors That Influence NGO Partner Selection

View the Resource By Nina F. O’Brien, Andrew Pilny, Yannick Atouba, Michelle Shumate, Janet L. Fulk, Peter R. Monge Scholars suggest three partnering strategies that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can use to pursue strategic relationships in civil society networks: (a) the development of overlapping ties associated with network closure, (b) adopting an intermediary role between two disconnected organizations associated with brokerage, and (c) complying with the match-making demands of third-party organizations.

How Does a Board of Directors Influence Within- and Cross-Sector Nonprofit Collaboration?

View the Resource By Jennifer Ihm, Michelle Shumate Board members play a significant, yet largely unexamined, role in nonprofit collaboration. Processes, such as finding prospective partners, creating common ground with a partner, and establishing appropriate collaborative governance implicate nonprofit board members. In contrast to the scholarship of the role of interlocking directorates as potential networks for nonprofit collaboration, this paper examines the role of board members’ social and human capital

A Multidimensional Network Approach to Strategic Communication

View the Resource By Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate In this article, we introduce a multidimensional network perspective as a theoretical and methodological touchstone for the study of strategic communication. The perspective embraces the various disciplinary traditions that are found under the strategic communication umbrella (e.g., advertising, corporate communication, organizational communication, and public relations) and gives primacy to communication as the constitutive element through which organizations make strategic decisions about network