An audience-based theory of firm purposefulness

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This chapter introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This chapter introduces topic modelling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.