Analyzing corporate ESG reporting through data mining: evolutionary trends and strategic model

Abstract

The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report is globally recognized as a keystone in sustainable enterprise development. However, current literature has not concluded the development of topics and trends in ESG contexts in the twenty-first century. Therefore, we selected 1114 ESG reports from global firms in the technology industry to analyze the evolutionary trends of ESG topics by text mining. We discovered the homogenization effect toward low environmental, medium governance, and high social features in the evolution. We also designed a strategic framework to look closer into the dynamic changes of firms’ within-industry representiveness and cross-sector distinctiveness, which demonstrates corporate social responsibility and sustainability. We found that companies are gradually converging toward the third quadrant, which indicates that firms contribute less to industrial outstanding and professional distinctiveness in ESG reporting. Firms choose to imitate ESG reports from each other to mitigate uncertainty and enhance behavioral legitimacy.

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