TY - JOUR
T1 - From Diffusion to Diffuse-ability
T2 - A Text-as-Data Approach to Explaining the Global Diffusion of Corporate Sustainability Policy
AU - Chalmers, Adam
AU - Klingler-Vidra, Robyn
AU - Van Den Broek, Onna Malou
N1 - Funding Information:
Research for this project would not have been possible without generous funding from the King's College London Faculty Research Fund, the King's Together Multi- and Interdisciplinary Research Grant, and the John Temple-ton Foundation. We are grateful to Ruben Ruiz Rufino, Christine Reh, Matia Vannoni, Christel Koop, and Dimiter Toshkov for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as to the participants of the Comparative Politics Research in Progress Workshop at King's College London (28.01.2021), the Hertie School's EU Governance Colloquium (01.03.2021), the 5th International Conference on Public Policy (08.07.2021) and the 37th EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) Colloquium (09.07.2021). Finally, we would like to thank our talented and hardworking team of research assistants: Anais Julin, Karissa Shah, Sixtine Gaudry, Julie Eriksen, Lucie Skopkova, and Gaurav Kathuria.
Funding Information:
Research for this project would not have been possible without generous funding from the King's College London Faculty Research Fund, the King's Together Multi- and Interdisciplinary Research Grant, and the John Templeton Foundation. We are grateful to Ruben Ruiz Rufino, Christine Reh, Matia Vannoni, Christel Koop, and Dimiter Toshkov for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as to the participants of the Comparative Politics Research in Progress Workshop at King's College London (28.01.2021), the Hertie School's EU Governance Colloquium (01.03.2021), the 5th International Conference on Public Policy (08.07.2021) and the 37th EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) Colloquium (09.07.2021). Finally, we would like to thank our talented and hardworking team of research assistants: Anais Julin, Karissa Shah, Sixtine Gaudry, Julie Eriksen, Lucie Skopkova, and Gaurav Kathuria.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2024/3
Y1 - 2024/3
N2 - This paper argues that attributes of diffusion objects, in their own right, shape the form and extent of policy diffusion. To date, diffusion scholarship focuses on actor-level attributes (e.g., connections, culture, physical proximity, etc.) to explain what is diffused and how much. Extending existing theory on the impacts of policies' textual properties on diffusion patterns, we argue that policies that are easier to understand, specific in their applicability, and that do not mandate specific behavior have their text diffused with less adaptation, regardless of the attributes of the authoring organization. We test our argument in the context of the global diffusion of corporate sustainability policy (CSP), analyzing a novel dataset of 1,429 CSPs from 100 countries, 20 international organizations, and 12 regional organizations over a 65-year period. Offering a precise measure of diffusion as the extent to which a source text is copied into an adopter text, we find statistical support for our hypothesis. We contribute to diffusion scholarship by helping to mainstream natural language processing methods and by theorizing how attributes of policy documents affect how much adaptation occurs.
AB - This paper argues that attributes of diffusion objects, in their own right, shape the form and extent of policy diffusion. To date, diffusion scholarship focuses on actor-level attributes (e.g., connections, culture, physical proximity, etc.) to explain what is diffused and how much. Extending existing theory on the impacts of policies' textual properties on diffusion patterns, we argue that policies that are easier to understand, specific in their applicability, and that do not mandate specific behavior have their text diffused with less adaptation, regardless of the attributes of the authoring organization. We test our argument in the context of the global diffusion of corporate sustainability policy (CSP), analyzing a novel dataset of 1,429 CSPs from 100 countries, 20 international organizations, and 12 regional organizations over a 65-year period. Offering a precise measure of diffusion as the extent to which a source text is copied into an adopter text, we find statistical support for our hypothesis. We contribute to diffusion scholarship by helping to mainstream natural language processing methods and by theorizing how attributes of policy documents affect how much adaptation occurs.
KW - Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
KW - ESG
KW - POLICY
KW - SUSTAINABILITY
KW - Natural language processing (NLP)
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85183966683&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/isq/sqad106
DO - 10.1093/isq/sqad106
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85183966683
SN - 0020-8833
VL - 68
JO - INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY
JF - INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY
IS - 1
M1 - sqad106
ER -
