My dissertation explores how public firms employ language in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports to lengthen the horizons of their strategic decisions. The three essays included in my dissertation introduce and investigate the pursuit of temporal equilibrium in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Specifically, I compare the emphasis placed on the short versus long- future in the annual sustainability reports of public firms and derive three explanations for the increased emphasis of long-termism.
In Essay 1 (Chapter 2), I describe how firms seek and find temporal equilibrium after the Financial Crisis. Using topic modeling, I linguistically and visually retrace the emergence of richer vocabularies by which firms describe their futures. This retrospective analysis shows how the emphasis on spatio-temporal metaphors (proximal and distal) qualified firms’ financial and social responsibilities.
In Essay 2 (Chapter 3), I investigate how firms allocate attention between the short- and long-future. I introduce the concept of bifocality to underscore that public firms focus on both the short- and long-future at once. Using fsQCA analysis on changes in four topics derived and described in Essay 1 over the decade following the Financial Crisis, I reveal four different ways in which organizations linguistically create their different futures.
In Essay 3 (Chapter 4), I elaborate on the role of third parties in accelerating firms’ long-termism. I focus on non-activist institutional investors who shared the fate of firms during the Financial Crisis by choosing to stay with the firms. I argue and find that these institutional investors increased long-termism whether they chose to stay (via a concentration mechanism) or leave (via a turnover mechanism) after the crisis. This essay extends the argument of attentional control by showing how attentional interdependencies during periods of adversity enable third parties to continue to influence firms’ horizons during periods of stability.
The three essays show how, in the decade following the Financial Crisis, public firms embraced spatio-temporal metaphors to qualify their activities, became bifocal by actively balancing near and far futures in their reports, and continued to match the longer-term horizons of institutional investors willing to share their fate
