Can Corporate Social Responsibility Lead to Social License? A Sentiment and Emotion Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The term social license (SL) refers to the acceptance or approval by a community of a company's presence. It is generally assumed in the literature that effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions will lead to an SL. In this study we examine the CSR‐SL relationship at the local community level and establish boundary conditions on the effectiveness of local CSR in creating an SL. Using consent‐based micro‐social contract theory, we theorize that commitment to local CSR improves the level to which a local community grants an SL to a multinational corporation (MNC), but the impact is moderated by the global legitimacy of the parent company, the nature of institutions in the host country, and the degree of polarization within the focal community. Based on 3696 articles regarding 43 global mining MNCs operating in 523 local communities between 2008 and 2020, we use natural language processing and sentiment analysis to evaluate the degree to which a local community grants an SL. Our empirical evidence indicates that local CSR does positively influence the granting of an SL, but the effect is reduced when there is strong rule of law or high community polarization and increased when the focal firm has strong global legitimacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".