CSR communication within controversial businesses - a closer look at the fast fashion industry

Abstract: Our planet is facing severe climate crises and the global companies are those who have the opportunity to make the biggest impact on how this will unfold in the future. The aim of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of how companies within questioned businesses are managing their CSR-communication and communicating their responsible initiatives and engagements on social media. Further, the responsible initiatives include organisations initial communication and how they are interacting by responding to reactions in the comment section. The fast fashion organisations H&M, Mango and Gina Tricot's social media communication have been used as empirical material to conduct the analysis in order to answer the research questions based on the theoretical background. The paper has an ontological stance from the perspective of social constructionism and an epistemological stance from the hermeneutical perspective. With this a qualitative content analysis (QCA) was conducted with collected material from the above mentioned organisation’s social media channels. The collected material was categorised into different Minimising harm and Maximising good-categories presented by Ju et als. (2021) together with a couple of own, identified, categories. Further, the companies responsibility initiatives in the comment sections were analysed to create an understanding of how the companies fulfil their sustainability commitment in the reactions that arise after their initial social media post. The paper concludes that the fast fashion organisations do not communicate “minimise harm” to the same extent as proposed by Lindorff et al. 's (2012) two-way model. The results also show recurring patterns of a category within “maximise good” which are collaborations. A category that has not emerged in previous research on the responsible communication of questioned companies. Further, the comment sections are not used as a platform to communicate their sustainability responsibilities, but instead as a customer service platform.