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Durch Social Media zu politischem Konsum? Eine Experimentalstudie zur Wirkung von journalistischen und mobilisierenden Hinweisen über die Nachhaltigkeit von Unternehmen
Abstract
This volume offers a wide range of insights into current media reception and effects research on the topic of ‘sustainability’. The contributions it contains deal with how this topic is communicated and negotiated on (social) media, how various message and context features affect sustainable behaviour, and what role established and ‘new’ actors—such as influencers or one’s own social media contacts—play in sustainability communication. Based on a broad understanding of sustainability, the articles document the current state of research in this field, answer open questions on an empirical basis and provide ideas for future research. With contributions by Jasmin Baake, B.A.; Dr. Marko Bachl; Janine N. Blessing, M.A.; Dr. Sandra Diehl; PD Dr. Marco Dohle; Caroline Eichner, M.Sc.; Anna Freytag, M.A.; Mareike Gensich, B.A.; Tanja Habermeyer, M.Sc.; Rebecca Hellmeier, B.A.; Elisabeth Hopfe, B.A.; Dr. Imke Hoppe; Dr. Anja Kalch; Dr. Ole Kelm; Prof. Dr. Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw; Dr. Isabell Koinig; Theresa Kraus, B.A.; Anica Lammers, B.A.; Filipa Lessing, B.A.; Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jörg Matthes; Carolina Müller, B.A.; Dr. Brigitte Naderer; Mag. Ariadne Neureiter, M.Sc.; Sophie Przyklenk, B.A.; Anna Schorn, M.A.; Dr. Felix Reer; Dr. Sabine Reich; Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler; Dr. Desirée Schmuck; Chelsea Walpert, B.A.; Gregor Willenbrock, M.A.; Anne Marie Zang, B.A. and Dr. Masoumeh Zibarzani.
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The ecological impacts of consumption are well acknowledged, and most people worldwide are likely to have encountered proofs for or information about it. Likewise, online and offline media seem to be full of information on the issue. Even so, large numbers of people are ‘non‐political’ consumers, inconsiderate of the ethical and ecological implications of what they buy and consume. Using representative survey data from Sweden collected in 2019, this paper shows that a major reason for non‐political consumerism can be seen in the lack of interpersonal ‘recruitment’ efforts; that is, deliberate attempts by some to influence another's consumption. Moreover, the analyses show that for a person having faced such attempts by others to influence their consumption is distinct from them discussing political consumption issues. With this, the paper also provides one of the first large‐N studies confirming recent theoretical propositions of an extended definition of political consumerism: discussion, that is, discursive action, is a sub‐form of political consumerism next to boycotting, buycotting, and lifestyle change. Interpersonal influence, in turn, is a key predictor of political consumerism. Altogether, the results suggest that spreading information may feed discursive actions. Yet, to get more people change their consumption choices and engage in political consumerism, what is needed is that people influence each other to do so.
Political consumerism refers to the deliberate purchase or avoidance of products, goods, or services for political reasons. For decades, researchers have studied the micro-level predictors of political consumerism in many countries and across a variety of contexts. However, many questions remain. Do resource-based models of political participation or theories of lifestyle politics best explain why some people are more likely to engage in political consumerism? To answer this question, we conduct a meta-analysis of 66 studies with more than 1000 tests. We find more support for theories of lifestyle politics. Political consumerism is associated with political distrust, liberal ideology, and media use, as well as education, political interest, and organizational membership. The findings help us understand the subset of people who are using their purchasing power to express political opinions. They also help us identify gaps in existing research.
On social network sites (SNS), people are increasingly confronted with news content—even if they have not actively been looking for it. Although it is widely recognized that SNS have become a main driver for such incidental news exposure, we know little about the factors that influence whether users engage with news encountered on SNS. Thus, this study investigates under which conditions incidental news exposure becomes actual engagement with news by asking how both the perception of the news post and general news usage patterns influence the intention to read news articles encountered on SNS as well as the intention to look for further information about the covered issues. Building on a mobile forced experience sampling study consisting of 840 Facebook news encounters reported from 124 participants, we find that news engagement is mostly determined by participants’ perceived interestingness of and prior knowledge about the issue of the news post and to a much lesser degree by social factors unique to SNS (i.e., feelings towards the spreader of the news). In contrast, no influence of content-independent news usage patterns on news engagement could be observed.
There is broad agreement that the regulative idea of sustainability needs to be specified in public deliberation so that it can contribute to sustainable development policies and practices. The media plays a critical role in this endeavor. However, journalists commonly criticize the terminology of ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ as blurred, fuzzy and ambiguous. The vibrant controversy over how journalists should engage with the sustainability terminology is however facing an apparent lack of research on how sustainability terminology actually has been embraced and used in the media.
This study aims to close the aforementioned research gaps in providing a twofold account of the field in Germany. First, in a trend analysis, it sketches the usage of sustainability terminology in six major German newspapers from 1995 to 2015. Second, in an in-depth analysis for the three years 2001, 2007 and 2013, more than 16 000 usages of sustainability terminology have been coded according to their underpinning meaning. The findings show that sustainability terminology in major German newspapers is used in about twice as many articles in 2015 compared with 1995. What changes is not only the frequency, but also the meanings, with which sustainability terminology is used. There is an apparent tendency towards a ‘semantic consolidation’ of sustainability terminology in the post-2000 years. The meaning thereby moves away from a non-specific and replaceable fashion word towards a more sophisticated and elaborated reflection of the concept of sustainable development. Data analysis finds that political alignment of the newspaper plays a critical role in this.
Der Beitrag stellt das Konzept der Nachhaltigkeit vor und gibt einen Einblick in die Forschung zur Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation. Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation wird als analytisches Konzept für die Erforschung von Umweltkommunikation vorgeschlagen. Um einen daran orientierten Analyserahmen zu entwickeln, werden verschiedene Ebenen der Beobachtung und Kommunikation unterschieden. Dieser Rahmen ermöglicht es, das Forschungsfeld zu strukturieren und ein Kategoriensystem zu entwickeln, das zur systematischen Analyse der Forschung zur Umweltkommunikation dienen kann. Durch die Einbeziehung der Nachhaltigkeitsperspektive kann die gesellschaftliche Relevanz der Forschung verdeutlicht werden. An einem Beispiel wird die Vorgehensweise bei der Anwendung des Analyserasters aufgezeigt.
Polls show a strong decline in public trust of traditional news outlets; however, social media offers new avenues for receiving news content. This experiment used the Facebook API to manipulate whether a news story appeared to have been posted on Facebook by one of the respondent's real-life Facebook friends. Results show that social media recommendations improve levels of media trust, and also make people want to follow more news from that particular media outlet in the future. Moreover, these effects are amplified when the real-life friend sharing the story on social media is perceived as an opinion leader. Implications for democracy and the news business are discussed.
An ongoing debate concerns the extent to which political consumerism constitutes political behavior. To address this debate, researchers have examined several predictors of political consumerism, but have not focused on its communicative dimensions, especially with respect to digital media. In this study we conceptualize political consumerism as a form of civic engagement, and we theorize that people who use social media are more likely to engage in political consumerism than those who do not. Using original survey data collected in the US, we find that political consumerism is more closely related to civic engagement than it is to political participation, and that use of social media mediates the relationship between general Internet use and political consumerism.
This article revisits the widely believed notion of the skeptical green consumer, in other words, that green consumers tend to distrust green advertising. Study 1, a survey of U.S. consumers, found no positive relationship between green consumerism and general ad skepticism. However, green consumerism was negatively related to green advertising skepticism. Study 2, a survey of Austrian consumers, addressed the underlying mechanism of this negative relationship in a mediation analysis. It was shown that green consumers saw more informational utility in green ads than nongreen consumers did. This, in turn, decreased their green advertising skepticism. The emotional appeal of green ads, however, had no impact on green advertising skepticism. Findings suggest that the “dilemma for marketers who desire to target the green consumer” (Zinkhan and Carlson 1995, p. 5) is far less serious than previously thought.
As ecological concerns evolve and diffuse throughout society, advertisers are interested in developing green (i.e., environmental) messages and are interested in targeting green customer segments. Unfortunately for advertisers, many green consumers have negative attitudes about business, and they often have negative impressions of the advertising industry. Here, this dilemma is examined from a variety of perspectives.
Political Consumerism captures the creative ways in which citizens, consumers and political activists use the market as their arena for politics. This book theorizes, describes, analyzes, compares and evaluates the phenomenon of political consumerism and how it attempts to use market choice to solve complex globalized problems. It investigates theoretically and empirically how and why consumers practice citizenship and have become important political actors. Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti describe consumers' engagement as an example of individualized responsibility taking, examining how political consumerism nudges and pressures corporations to change their production practices, and how consumers emerge as a force in global affairs. Unlike other studies, it also evaluates if and how consumer actions become effective mechanisms of global change. Stolle and Micheletti offer a candid discussion of the limitations of political consumerism as a form of participation and as a problem-solving mechanism.
This article examines the role of the Internet as a source of political information and a sphere for public expression. Informational media use, whether traditional news sources or online public affairs content, is expected to foster interpersonal political discussion and online civic messaging, contributing to increased civic participation. Using two-wave national panel survey data, three types of synchronous structural equation models are tested: cross sectional (relating individual differences), fixed effects (relating intraindividual change), and auto regressive (relating aggregate change). All models reveal that online media complement traditional media to foster political discussion and civic messaging. These two forms of political expression, in turn, influence civic participation. Other variable orderings are tested to compare the theorized model to alternative causal specifications. Results reveal that the model produces the best fit, empirically and theoretically, with the influence of the Internet, rivaling the mobilizing power of traditional modes of information and expression.
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues--that is, the media may set the "agenda." of the campaign.
Although the agenda-setting effects of the news media on people's attention to, comprehension of, and opinions about topics in the news primarily have been studied in political communication settings, the central theoretical idea — the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda — fits equally well in the world of business communication. In the case of corporate reputations, only the operational definitions of the objects and attributes on these agendas are changed here to frame five key theoretical propositions about the influence of news coverage on corporate reputations among the public. This presentation of five basic propositions about first and second-level agenda setting effects as well as intermedia agenda-setting effects offers a theoretical roadmap for systematic empirical research into the influence of the mass media on corporate reputations.
How do advertising and other attempts to influence affect opinions, attitudes, and behavior? The question “how persuasion works” is of still increasing importance for corporations and social science alike. The Elaboration Likelihood Model is one of the most prominent and most frequently cited models of persuasion. The book, which is now in its second revised edition, introduces the main features of Petty and Cacioppo’s model in an easy-to-read and comprehensible manner. Particular attention is paid to the perspectives of communication science and advertising practice: What is the use of the ELM for marketing communication and its investigation?
The book presents the seven fundamental postulates of the ELM, followed by its references to mass communication, particularly advertising. Further chapters are dedicated to the experimental methodology of persuasion research, criticism of the model, and alternative persuasion models.
We investigate how media attention to large-scale corporate scandals has changed over time, and how the clustering of different scandals alters media attention to individual scandals. Building on the literature on media agenda-setting, we examine quality newspaper coverage for a sample of 123 major corporate scandals between 1990 and 2016. Whilst previous studies have typically examined specific corporate scandals in isolation, we find that the interplay of scandals is characterized both by crowding-in processes (or hype effects) – which predominantly occur when scandals fall into different categories – and crowding-out processes (or boredom effects) – which dominate when scandals are of one and the same category. Over time, and reflecting the emergence of social media, we find substantial changes in attention patterns, where more recent scandals have attracted significantly higher peaks of attention followed by a much steeper decline.
Today, environmental issues are not only communicated by traditional mass media, but they are also posted, shared and discussed in social media. This raises the question of the extent to which social media use also influences real environmental engagement. Using original survey data collected among young adults in Germany, this study demonstrates that social media use is clearly associated with stronger engagement in green lifestyle politics. Further, regarding different motives and forms of social media use, the findings of the study show that active use of social media for informational purposes predicts green lifestyle politics.
Coming across news on social network sites (SNS) largely depends on news-related activities in one's network. Although there are many different ways to stumble upon news, limited research has been conducted on how distinct news curation practices influence users' intention to consume encountered content. In this mixed-methods investigation, using Facebook as an example, we first examine the results of an experiment (study 1, n = 524), showing that getting tagged in comments to news posts promotes news consumption the most. Based on this finding, we then focus on actively tagging users by investigating news tagging motives/practices with interactive qualitative interviews centered on participants' Facebook activity logs (study 2, n = 13). Overall, the findings show how news tagging, albeit a strong catalyst for reading and interacting with news, mostly favors users already interested in news, thus challenging the optimistic assumption that SNS might foster incidental learning among less interested audiences.
More information here: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190629038.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190629038
Incidental exposure to shared news on Facebook is a vital but understudied aspect of how citizens get involved with politics. This experiment investigates the influence of recommender characteristics (tie strength, political knowledge, political similarity) and different media sources (tabloids, legacy, and digital-born outlets) including multiple mediators (e.g., social pressure, outlet credibility) on incidental exposure to political news on Facebook. A 3 × 3 multi-stimulus, between-subject experiment with two additional quasi-factors and 135 different stimuli was conducted using a representative sample (N = 507). Results showed that strong ties and recommenders with high knowledge increase news exposure, but the impact of knowledge is limited to recommenders with similar political opinions. Similar effects occur for different media types, which also have an independent impact on news exposure. Structural equation modeling reveals that media source effects are mediated through media perceptions, whereas recommender effects work via the desire for social monitoring and perceived issue importance.
This study investigates the relation between age and sustainability awareness for consumers via the third, mediating variable of influencers to reduce the intention-behaviour purchase gap. It proposes that traditional theories of planned behaviour are limited as they do not account for unconscious and indirect pathways to axiological change. A structural model with the three constructs of age, influencers and sustainability awareness is tested with LISREL on a sample of 788 consumers, complemented with focus groups and interviews to generate deeper insight into the model’s constructs. The results demonstrate a relationship between age and sustainability awareness, as well as between the importance of influencers for increased sustainability awareness in younger consumers, namely millennials. This suggests that practitioners should work with influencers perceived as trustworthy to increase sustainability awareness for the millennial sub-set consumer group. The methodology applies a mixed approach, interpreting both qualitative and quantitative aspects, and contributes to the ethical consumerism literature with new knowledge on age differences connected to sustainability awareness, particularly highlighting on the influence of influencers for the younger generations.
The development and diffusion of digital media is one frequently mentioned factor to explain the popularity of political consumerism; yet, to what extent (online) information and (online) communication activities influence the intensity of political consumerism has rarely been investigated. Arguing that (online) information and (online) communication activities have impacts on various forms of political consumerism – namely, on boycotts and buycotts – two data sets collected in Germany were analysed. Based on the citizen communication mediation model, the results indicate that (online) communication mediates the influence of (online) information on boycotts and buycotts; furthermore, the results suggest that boycotts are influenced by communication activities in a stronger way than buycotts.
This research provides a basis for understanding how the contents of media coverage about CSR activities relates to the fit between these CSR activities and the organizations’ core activities. In two steps, 513 news articles about organizations’ CSR activities were analyzed. First, an expert review determined the fit between the CSR initiatives presented in the news articles and the core business of the organizations pursuing these initiatives. Second, a quantitative content analysis measured tone and framing of the news articles. The results reveal that while CSR fit does not influence tone, it does partly impact the framing of the media coverage, as CSR fit leads to a positive framing of organizations and their CSR activities. However, vice versa, CSR misfit does not necessarily lead to a negative representation of organizations and their CSR in the media coverage. In order to maximally benefit from their CSR activities and achieve optimal media coverage, organizations are advised to not only engage in CSR, but seek to implement initiatives that are well integrated into their core business.
Our understanding of how political consumerism relates to broader civic engagement has been clouded by the myriad ways in which it has been conceptualized in the literature. In this study, we draw a distinction between the use of socially conscious consumption practices in everyday life and participation in organized boycotts and ‘buycotts.’ We argue that whether political consumerism is enacted as lifestyle politics or as contentious politics may depend, at least in part, on the motivations that underlie political consumerism and the way in which they orient behavior in the online environment. Results of a national survey of U.S. adults show that while both value-expressive and social-identification motivation facilitate comparable levels of content consumption, only the latter facilitates the more involved act of posting and sharing original content. Moreover, results show that while both uses of internet, in turn, facilitate lifestyle and contentious political consumerism, content production facilitates significantly greater levels of both. This was especially pronounced for contentious political consumerism. These findings suggest that content production may be an important vehicle for channeling motivations for political consumerism rooted in social-identification needs toward participation in more organized and collective modes of consumer action. Implications for understanding the potential political consumerism holds as a gateway to participation in conventional political activities are discussed.
Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system.The Unheavenly Chorusis the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorusis the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice.The Unheavenly Chorusreveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.
This empirical research explores how 16 global corporations from four different industry sectors—retail, technology equipment, food/beverage/tobacco, and consumer goods—use social media platforms and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to communicate about sustainability. Facebook, Twitter, CEO letters from annual reports and CSR/sustainability reports, and other company documentation are examined to compare the content and scope of these firms’ corporate communication. The sample is divided into two subsamples (Green and Not Green firms) using Newsweek's Greenest Company 2012 rankings, and compared for differential use of social media and corporate reports. Results show that communication varies across firm and industry regarding types of sustainability initiatives reported, metrics employed, and communication media utilized, and that Green firms are more active than Not Green firms both in addressing sustainability and in general social media activity. Implications are discussed herein and recommendations are presented for companies seeking to better understand the effective use of social media and sustainability communication.
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