According to Wikipedia, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) “is an expression used to describe what some see as a company’s obligation to be sensitive to the needs of all of its stakeholders in its business operations.”
In order to identify the most important influencers on CRS in the United Kingdom an Onalytica Stakeholder Analysis was conducted.
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You can download a more comprehensive summary with network maps here - 250k pdf)
Influence
You exert influence on people when they listen to what you say or read what you have said – and vice versa.
We form our opinion about all sorts of matters using information that has been supplied to us by other parties. Is the weather getting warmer? Is the ice at the North Pole melting? We may have an opinion on this but have we actually measured it ourselves? Most of us haven’t – we rely on news media we trust to form our opinion. But when we take in information from other sources, they influence us.
When calculating influence we gather information available in the public domain and analyse it to find out who is referencing whom when it comes to the issue we are analysing.
The way we calculate influence is equivalent to the way influence of academic journals and universities are calculates: using citation analysis.
At the heart of this type of influence measurement is a simple, but central conjecture:
Person X has influence on Person Y regarding a particular issue if Person Y is dependent on Person X for information about the issue.
(“Person” can mean organisation, website, person, etc, according to the context.)
In academic citation analysis this is put into practice by a slight rephrasing:
Person X has influence on Person Y regarding the issues covered in the academic paper, if Person Y cites person X as a reference in the paper.
When measuring “issue influence” Onalytica uses the very same principle.
Based on the principles above systems of equations can be formed and influence calculated.
One of the great advantages of this kind of influence measurement is that it takes indirect influence into account.
Methodology
To construct an Onalytica Stakeholder Analysis (OSA) a focus issue needs to be defined. In this case “Corporate Social Responsibility” was chosen. (The issue can be a simple set of words or a more complex set texts and rules.)
Onalytica’s proprietary issue-focused web crawler identifies and downloads any document (Web pages, word, pdf or PowerPoint documents) about the issue found on the Internet; typically around 10-20 thousand.
The documents are then analysed for references. So if a document, created by organisation X, refers organisation Y in the context we are focusing on, then we take it that organisation X deems organisation Y relevant to the issue. It also on average means that organisation Y, to some extent, influence organisation X on the particular issue.
After some consolidation and statistical filtering we end up with set of interlinked stakeholders; typically 1000 +/- 500. These stakeholders constitute a body of stakeholders whose relevance to the issue can be substantiated.
Using well known mathematical procedures we then calculate metrics of interest; mostly influence metrics.
Table 1 - Issue Influence Index™ (above)
Issue Influence Index™ is a generic measure of influence. It measures both direct and indirect influence and is calculated like a citation index.
The scale is linear, ranging from 1 (one) and upwards. An index of 1 can be interpreted as “no particular influence”. A stakeholder with an index of 4 can be interpreted as having twice the influence as someone who has an index of 2.
An organisation with no particular influence on the issue in focus has an Issue Influence Index™ value of 1.
Figure 1 (above) shows how organisations from Table 1 reference each other. The direction of the arrow shows the reference. The influence is consequently the other way.
The size of the dot representing each organisation is proportional to their total influence.
Three of the organisations, Barclays, Heart of the City and Investis; are not referenced by the rest of the group (nor vice versa). These 3 organisations thus derive their influence from organisations with less influence than those listed in Table 1.
Table 2 - Information Influence (Above)
Table 2 shows a metric popular in network analysis (where it is often called “betweenness centrality”). We refer to it as “Information Influence” because it gives a good indication of how central a stakeholder is to the distribution of information about the issue in focus.
News media and others with an editorial role (collection of information and then redistributing it in edited form to a large audience) usually have a high Information Influence.
Information Influence is not as good a measure of “real” influence as the Issue Influence Index™ in Table 1, but it shows who is a supplier of information about the issue to a large audience (directly or indirectly).
Figure 2 (above) shows how the organisations in Table 2 reference each other.
Unlike Figure 1 we here have a situation where all the top organisations reference each other.
Again the size of the dot representing each organisation is proportional to their real influence as listed in Table 1.
Contact us if you are interested in the full analysis.
Issue Influence Index™ is a trademark of Onalytica Ltd.