定性研究方法作业：Qualitative Research Methods Assignment

在企业社会责任的文献（如niskala与tarna，2003；弗里德曼2006英里，morsing；舒尔茨，2006）多em-phasis一直放在之间的有效沟通，公司及其利益相关者和成功的利益相关者的对话（maignan说，费雷尔和赫尔特，1999）发挥重要作用，甚至在公司的整体成功的。

Introduction and a Brief Literature Review
 

In the CSR literature (e.g. Niskala & Tarna, 2003; Friedman & Miles, 2006; Morsing & Schultz, 2006) much em-phasis has been put on the effective communication between a company and its stakeholders and successful stakeholder dialogue is said (Maignan, Ferrell & Hult, 1999) to play an important role even in companies’ overall success. However, creating a forum for flourishing stakeholder dialogue is easier said than done. To make CSR communication slightly less complicated Ásványi (2009) offers a list of different ways of managing CSR communication, includ-ing tools such as CSR reporting, codes of conducts and logos of certification, all of which facilitate the flow of information to relevant stakeholders. How-ever, many of these techniques are just one-way information from the com-pany down to the stakeholders, lacking a real opportunity for feedback, inter-action and mutual learning (Morsing, 2006). By contrast, social media, which is by definition interactive and engaging (Benkler, 2006; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), can serve as an innovative platform for sharing experiences and thoughts. If used wisely, social media holds great potential in helping compa-nies to pinpoint different stakeholder demands and to respond accordingly.   
A quick search using keywords ‘social media’ and ‘stakeholder communica-tion’ or ‘CSR communication’ on some major research databases pulls hardly any articles, let alone books. Fieseler, Fleck and Meckel (2010) discuss CSR in the blogosphere and Du, Bhattacharya and Sen (2010) briefly refer to social media as an informative communication channel in their study. Consequently, it seems that if there are academic papers written on the subject of CSR com-munication and social media, those texts are either in the pipeline (which might well be the case considering the novelty of social media as a phenome-non) or have been written from a rather narrow viewpoint. Having said that, though, the business community has acknowledged the potential of social media in stakeholder communication. The SMI (2010) ranks companies based on how well they communicate CSR-related issues through social media and companies like Starbucks and Timberland communicate with their stake-holders through different social media applications. The first mentioned, for instance, asks customers to share their ideas (on products, experiences and involvement) through MyStarbucksIdea.com where thoughts are then dis-cussed and voted by other users and then the best ones put into practice (Starbucks, 2010).   (责任编辑：charlie)