Legitimating CSR discourse on Facebook during the pandemic: A comparative analysis of Romanian food retail companies

Abstract

Crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, determine organizations to reshape their way of communicating with stakeholders. Facebook is one of the communication channels used by food retail companies to transmit CSR messages during the pandemic. Approaching the quantitative content analysis, the current paper reveals the themes and legitimation that emerged from Facebook posts about corporate social responsibility made in the first year of the pandemic by the food retail companies Carrefour Romania, Kaufland Romania and Lidl Romania. The analysis is centred on 289 posts from the Facebook pages of the three companies, published between March 2020 and February 2021. According to the results, the most common communication topic used by Lidl and Carrefour was responsibility towards customers. In the case of the Kaufland company, the most frequent topic was that of responsibility towards medical personnel, patients and health institutions. The findings additionally reveal that Kaufland and Carrefour, the companies that outline the objectives and methods for implementing CSR initiatives, primarily employed the strategy of rationalization legitimation. Lidl employed authority legitimation as its most common strategy, citing authorities in the fields of public health and corporate social responsibility.