Hochschulbibliographie

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is of increasing importance for the long-term success of corporations. Extending existing literature this paper explores corporate identity as important determinant for CSR disclosure. The relationship was examined based on 498 German companies that provided English language CSR reports and responded to a company survey measuring CSR-oriented corporate identity. CSR disclosure has been analyzed with an automated content analysis technique using artificial intelligence. Results indicate that value chain and future-oriented dimensions, which were more pronounced in mature CSR concepts, foster CSR disclosure, while introversive corporate identity dimensions that were strong in low level CSR concepts hinder the release of CSR information. The paper shows that a tradition of social responsibility and values results into a low perceived need for legitimacy and outwards communication. The findings support the view that that a combination of voluntary disclosure theory and legitimacy theory is necessary to explain the drivers and constraints of CSR disclosure.

The economic literature on the superstar phenomenon provides empirical evidence on different types of stars, above all athletes and musicians. A new and, to our best knowledge, unexplored area of this star theory arouse with the development of social media markets. In this paper, we analyse a unique sample of 200 YouTube stars out of four different video categories to address the research gap. By employing econometric methods from panel data analysis, we contribute to answering the following research questions: (i) Are the classic theoretical concepts of popularity and superstardom by Rosen, MacDonald and Adler applicable? (ii) Can social media stars actively influence their popularity by employing special upload strategies? We find empirical evidence that former success positively and significantly influences the current success of social media stars, as theoretically presumed by MacDonald. Furthermore, the results support Adler's assumptions that the most popular stars snowball into superstardom due to higher growth rates. Finally, our investigation shows that social media stars can actively influence their popularity with distinctive upload strategies and market behaviour.