A governance approach to stakeholder engagement in sustainable enterprises – evidence from B Corps

Sustainable enterprises face a risk for which the pressure over financial sustainability “crowds out” their impact mission. Corporate governance mechanisms can play an important role in managing the tensions between the two objectives, by steering and driving stakeholder engagement processes. At the same time, the rise of social media has provided firms with a platform for undertaking stakeholder engagement on a large scale. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine how the governance mechanisms of sustainable enterprises affect engagement with stakeholders on social media. Specifically, we identify three distinctive mechanisms for a governance approach to stakeholder engagement in sustainable enterprises: the legal purpose beyond profit maximisation, directors’ commitment to purpose, and the adoption of purpose-specific accountability mechanisms. We argue that each of them matters for the extent to which sustainable enterprises engage with stakeholders on social media, as well as the quality of this engagement. By scraping and classifying non-financial tweets posted by 1,074 U.S. B Corps between 2014 and 2018 and those posted by stakeholders towards the firm, we find that the legal and ethical mechanisms are positively related to the quality of engagement while the accountability mechanism is related to both the extent and quality of engagement. Our study sheds light on the implications of governance mechanisms in steering social media stakeholder engagement in sustainable enterprises.