지속가능 경영을 둘러싼 정당성 담론의 지형 탐색

From the perspective of legitimacy theory, the driving force towing sustainable management is the stakeholders’ legitimacy pressure that business activities must comply with social norms. This is the reason why we need to explore how the stakeholders’ legitimacy pressure and the corporate legitimation strategy in relation to sustainable management occur in the media discourse. To investigate how media discourse on corporate legitimacy is constructed around sustainable management, this paper analyzed public discourse expressed in 16,716 sustainable management blogs through Python-based text mining. The results of multifaced analysis through various text mining techniques were relatively consistent. As a result of semantic network analysis and word embedding, the voices resonating in the discoursive topography of the entire blog were about the stakeholders’ ‘legitimacy pressure’ and the corporate ‘legitimation efforts.’ As a result of the cluster analysis, the ‘responsibility-contribution’ frame constituting the ‘legitimacy pressure’ discourse, and the ‘grand prize-award’ and ‘index-selection’ frames constituting the ‘legitimation efforts’ discourse were extracted. Sentiment analysis results showed that sustainable management was framed positively overall. This paper is expected to contribute to research in related fields, partly because this reported a case that social media can become a polyphonic public sphere where various voices compete for discourse, and partly because this examined the voices of the two major actors of discourse (i.e., companies and stakeholders) in a balanced way and suggested practical implications for both of them.