Pandemic Corporate Citizens : Performing Corporate Citizenship during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic offered a communication opportunity for organizations to reconsider their social responsibilities and communicatively position themselves in relation to the central questions of risk, safety, and social support during the pandemic. This chapter explores the social responsibility rhetoric employed by Nordic companies during the first year of the pandemic. As our empirical entry point, we use a large dataset that covers the Twitter activity of the 600 largest companies in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. After filtering the data with a keyword method, we conducted a qualitative analysis for a subset of 3,729 original tweets sent by 259 companies. Our findings highlight three main orientations the companies used to rhetorically construct their societal roles in the pandemic: information orientation, market orientation, and political orientation. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic, as an adjustable crisis, provided rhetorical opportunities for companies in their continuous strive to be perceived as socially responsible and ethical corporate actors in society while simultaneously maintaining the status quo of market capitalism.