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Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of enabling organizations in the processes whereby institutional investors collectively influence corporate managers on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues. We develop a framework combining stakeholder and collective action theory to explain how institutional investors influence corporations through collective engagement and to specify how enabling organizations influence this process.

Methodology/approach – To evaluate our framework, we investigate the role of the organizational platform provided by the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) initiative in supporting institutional investors’ collaborative engagement with corporations on ESG issues.

Findings – Our findings clarify how investors enhance their sources of power, legitimacy and urgency and attract managers’ attention through collaborative engagement, and show how they manage these attributes to reshape the legitimacy and urgency of their claims in the eyes of managers. Our results also show how enabling organizations such as the PRI initiative facilitate the emergence of collective action by lowering barriers to entry and providing a mobilizing structure, support collaborative efforts by adding their own legitimacy, normative power and persistence to the collaborative engagement, and create conditions for a lasting dialogue between investors and managers by providing a hybrid organizational space.

Social implications – In explaining how to enhance institutional investors’ collective action on ESG issues, this paper shows how we could reorient financial market forces toward sustainability.

Originality/value of paper – The paper benefited from a unique access to confidential and internal data from the UN-PRI initiative and provides a new framework.

Institutions and organizations are increasingly using the digital media to communicate with stakeholders on a day-to-day basis and during crisis situations. Therefore, this chapter presents a bibliographic analysis on digital corporate communication technologies. The grounded theory’s inductive approach was used to capture and interpret the findings from Scopus-indexed publications. The articles were scrutinized in their entirety, including their research questions, methodologies and interpretation of the findings. Afterwards, this contribution identifies the opportunities and challenges that emerged during an unprecedented coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. In conclusion, it implies that there is scope for institutions and organizations to incorporate digital and social media in their crises’ communications and risk management plans. This will enable them to be in a better position to engage in credible and transparent dialogic communications with different stakeholders.

This chapter argues that in today’s complex, globalised and technologised world, business and communication cannot remain in their separate silos – neither in academia nor in practice. The chapter approaches the topic with the help of a case and discusses how communication studies have invaded the fortress of the Aalto University School of Business, Finland. The development of an international Master’s Programme in Corporate Communication was informed by three major research projects in particular, which focused on internal communication practices of multinational companies and the perceptions of communication professionals on the knowledge and skills required of future communicators. Although Corporate Communication studies have been accommodated by the business school fortress for over 10 years, the time has not been without multidisciplinary challenges.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the proactive role played by investor relations officers (IROs) in enhancing the quality and delivery of corporate social performance (CSP) information to social responsibility investment (SRI) analysts and investors, thereby improving the link between CSP and corporate financial performance (CFP). The increasing pressures on corporations to produce and communicate CSP information will be described, as well as how the timely and meaningful communication of CSP can improve CFP.

Methodology/approach – Subsequent to a review of relevant literature, three case examples from McDonald’s, Nestlé, and Stora Enso illustrate Hockerts and Moir’s grounded theory framework that suggest how IROs can improve communication of CSP.

Findings – This chapter illustrates three levels of communicating CSP information. First, IROs target SRI investors and respond to ESG inquiries and surveys. At the second level, IROs integrate ESG information into business strategy and financial results. At the third level, IROs actively market CSP and create a two-way proactive dialogue between SRI investors and senior management and the board.

Practical implications – This chapter provides practical examples to improve ESG activities and their communication via the IRO to SRI analysts and investors.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the literature on the CSP–CFP link by illustrating how proactive IROs are improving the CSP information channel to SRI securities analysts and investors. Furthermore, it advances the theory and research concerning the impact of the information channel between IROs and securities analysts behind the CSP–CFP link.