Sustainable Development Goals as unifying narratives in large UK firms' Twitter discussions

TL;DR

This study uses big data from Twitter and complex network analysis to assess how major UK firms engage with Sustainable Development Goals, revealing sectoral, social, and stakeholder engagement patterns in real-time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interdisciplinary approach combining social media analysis and complex network methods to monitor firms' SDG engagement in nearly real-time.

Findings

SDGs unify UK firms' Twitter discussions

Social themes dominate SDG-related conversations

Engagement varies by community, sector, and stakeholder group

Abstract

To achieve sustainable development worldwide, the United Nations set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for humanity to reach by 2030. Society is involved in the challenge, with firms playing a crucial role. Thus, a key question is to what extent firms engage with the SDGs. Efforts to map firms' contributions have mainly focused on analysing companies' reports based on limited samples and non-real-time data. We present a novel interdisciplinary approach based on analysing big data from an online social network (Twitter) with complex network methods from statistical physics. By doing so, we provide a comprehensive and nearly real-time picture of firms' engagement with SDGs. Results show that: 1) SDGs themes tie conversations among major UK firms together; 2) the social dimension is predominant; 3) the attention to different SDGs themes varies depending on the community and sector firms belong to; 4) stakeholder engagement is higher on posts related to global challenges compared to general ones; 5) large UK companies and stakeholders generally behave differently from Italian ones. This paper provides theoretical contributions and practical implications relevant to firms, policymakers and management education. Most importantly, it provides a novel tool and a set of keywords to monitor the influence of the private sector on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.