Managing legitimacy during political disruption
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
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93+9
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Abstract
On the 24th of February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, many companies were faced with the choice to either exit or stay in Russia. For some companies leaving was easier, while for others the choice was more difficult, as many companies had invested large amounts of money in Russia over the years and they had numerous employees working in the country. The media and public, especially in western countries, were putting significant pressure on companies to fully exit the Russian market and not fully exiting could affect the legitimacy of a company. Due to the long border and history between Russia and Finland, the feelings that the war in Ukraine evoked in the Finnish public made Finns critical about the actions of Finnish companies with operations in Russia. This thesis is a case study on two Finnish companies, Nokian Tyres and Fazer. Through the lens of Legitimation Theory and Stakeholder Theory, this paper focuses on what discursive legitimation strategies the two companies employed to legitimise the future of their operations in Russia, how the largest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, wrote about the two companies, and how the Finnish public reacted. The findings of the thesis highlight how different factors affect the discursive legitimation strategies utilised by companies in their communication. In the case of Nokian Tyres, which is a publicly listed Finnish company and thus their main audience for legitimation are their shareholders, the predominant discursive legitimation strategy used by Nokian Tyres was rationalisation, founded upon financial capitalist ideology, where the company rationalised their actions from the perspective of how they affects the financial stance of the company. Fazer on the other hand, is not a publicly listed company, and thus their legitimation efforts were specifically targeted towards the general public, the main customer of Fazer. The main discursive legitimation strategy used by Fazer was moralisation, which was based on the ideology of humanism, as the press releases of Fazer focused on the effects of their action on their employees in Russia, Ukraine and the feelings of their customers in Finland. These legitimation strategies resulted in widely different results and reactions from the Finnish public.Description
Thesis advisor
Saittakari, IirisKoveshnikov, Alexei