How to communicate sustainability issues across cultures? A content analysis
of international environmental nongovernmental organization sustainability
communication strategy on Twitter
Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication Master’s programme Communication ScienceCorporate Communication
Danjing Zhou - 12109045 Supervisor: Anke Wonneberger Date of Submission: 28th June 2019
Abstract
Growing globalization trends have resulted in transnational communication across cultures. ENGOs are facing the dilemma of creating appropriate sustainability messages unequivocally across diverse cultures while being congruent with their purpose to mobilization for specific global issues and maintain consistency at the same time. In this study, we combine some of the most widely used cultural dimensions to demonstrate the cross-cultural influence on ENGOs’ sustainability communication activities on Twitter and how is the effect of those strategies on audience engagement across cultures. Our analysis is conducted as a content analysis of the Twitter content from Greenpeace and WWF’s branches from high-context and low-context cultures.
Our analysis shows that ENGOs from two cultural groups had implemented some pervasive and effective sustainability communication strategies and they both aim to be persuasive but use contrasting approaches between times. With regards to engagement, on the whole people from low context cultures are more willing to interact with ENGOs and express themselves on social media. Culture only influences the relationship between the content with explicit/implicit and injunctive social norms strategies and people’s retweet behavior.
ENGOs’ communication for sustainability has not made full use of the power and potential of social media, two-way interactive communication and the combination of different sustainability tactics still need to improve based on similar studies as we have done.
Acknowledgments
Hereby, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and guidance of my
supervisor Anke Wonneberger who offered selfless help during the period of thesis writing. She gave me great encouragement and inspiration to work on this research.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Xin Dang and Jinghan Cai who helped me with the coding procedure for content analysis. Without their support, the data analysis and further research couldn’t be completed.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my family and beloved friends, especially Zeran Cui. They are always very supportive and encourage me during a hard time and then go further.
How to communicate sustainability issues across cultures? A content analysis of
international environmental nongovernmental organization sustainability
communication strategy on Twitter
Introduction
With the penetration of internet technology and the rise of advancing active sustainability ethos, fundamental changes are certainly underway with regard to sustainability communication. Globalized social media has proved to be one of the most powerful channels for sustainability communication as they enable organizations to reach more audiences, maximize the worldwide impact, generate new discourse openly and even prompt behavioral changes (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012; Tasențe & Placinta, 2016; Ji, Harlow, Cui, & Wang, 2018). Likewise, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) such as Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of Earth, have
received significant attention by the public in recent years (Coombs, 2014; Guo & Saxton, 2013; Aaker, Vohs, & Mogilner, 2010).
Growing globalization trends have resulted in transnational communication across cultures. No organization on the globe today can ignore cross-cultural management issues (Claeyé, 2014), which means cultural values are considered as one of the most significant attributes of ENGOs communication activities as well (Fu et al., 2004; Valaei, Rezaei, Wan Ismail, & Oh, 2016). For many international ENGOs, they have distributed offices all over the world and most of them operate their own social media accounts independently. Although it could be more effective for them to use their own unique spot to launch the debate regarding the local cultural discourse system, the advent of culture clashes has become salient. The online
stakeholders from different territories are quite distinct as well (Balser & Mcclusky, 2005), which would have a great impact on their perception of sustainability messages and the potential of engagement. According to Balser and Mcclusky (2005), NGOs that evaluated as most effective should use a consistent, thematic rationale in dealing with stakeholder issues. Hence, localization of the communication strategies on social media has become a critical challenge for international ENGOs, they are facing the dilemma of creating appropriate sustainability messages
unequivocally across diverse cultures while being congruent with their purpose to mobilization for specific global issues and maintain consistency at the same time (Zhang, Tao, & Kim, 2014).
Aside from the cross-cultural challenges, with regards to sustainability communication, the persuasive strategy needs to be noticed because the sustainability initiatives mostly expect actual reaction (e.g., donation) or even behavioral change (e.g., stop using plastic bags) for the general good other than personal interest. In that case, ENGOs' communication objective relies much on audience diffusion (e.g., retweet) on social media (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012; Guo & Saxton, 2013). That is to say, compared with other commercial organizations, it is somehow more important for them to convey messages in a more persuasive manner. Many tactics and concepts were already testified to be effective and valuable, which include: social norms (Hardeman, Font, & Nawijn, 2017), efficacy (Doherty & Webler, 2016; Chen, 2015), self-identity (Lauren, Smith, Louis, & Dean, 2017), emotional and normative appeals (Ji et al., 2018), gain and loss frame (Lu, 2015), and so on. Those messages in transit are likely to be influenced by the cultural backgrounds of both the content creators and receivers (Waters & Lo, 2012; Miller, 2003). It is not hard to imagine that people from different cultural backgrounds would have a different likelihood of engagement to different content. Considering the fact that the levels of engagement were still relatively low although NGOs are actively trying to embrace two-way
interactive communication and community building on social media (Guidry, Waters, & Saxton, 2014; Lovejoy, Waters, & Saxton, 2012), we expect it would be meaningful to have an insight of their communication effect by investigating the relationship between users’ engagement and different cultures in regarding to the specific sustainability strategies.
However, while the growing studies of NGOs’ general communication strategies and campaigns, researchers and practitioners lack proper attention to cultural values and its influence beyond NGOs’ sustainability communication and stakeholder engagement (Valaei et al., 2016; Villarino & Font, 2015). Thus, our study aims to address that gap, the main objective of the present study is twofold: 1) to examine and identify the usage of ENGOs‘ sustainability communication strategy across discrepant cultures on social media; 2) and the effect of those different strategies on people’s online engagement. The research questions are: To what extent do international ENGOs apply different sustainability communication strategies on Twitter across cultures? And how is the effect of those strategies on people’s engagement in terms of retweets? Specifically, this study focuses on how sustainability communication patterns of Greenpeace and WWF are reflected in their Twitter content among selected cultures. To this end, we base our arguments on various cultural studies from a cross-cultural approach, to associate with
sustainability communication against the persuasiveness framework according to Villarino and Font (2015), as well as some of the well-known persuasion models (e.g. see Du, Bhattacharya, Sen, 2010; McGuire, 1989; Meyers-Levy & Malaviya, 1999). The analysis is conducted as content analysis, sample cultures and organizations were chosen based on various empirical studies which we have covered in the following section.
Theoretical Background and Hypotheses Cross-cultural communication
The concept of culture is more than difficult to define. Culture begins with geography and demography, in view of values, beliefs, motives, and identities that people in the same group collectively share with (Hall, 1976; Hofstede, 1980). “Communication is culture and culture is communication” (Hall, 1959, p. 186), from that famous statement, we have acknowledged that communication is always of concomitance with culture. Needless to say, it would be too rough to categorize cultures solely based on one framework, not to mention a comprehensive concept that could characterize the complexity of every culture and context (Hofstede, 2006, 2010). Thus, we complemented multiple frameworks and concepts together as the basis of our argument in current study.
The findings of Hall, Hofstede, and GLOBE project on cultures provide the basis for this research, including high- and low-context cultures (Hall, 1976; Hall, Slack, & Grossberg, 2016), and dimensions of national cultures (Hofstede, 1980, 1983, 2011; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Hall’s culture study was the first academic guideline for cross-cultural research, and unlike others, its conceptualization focuses on a communication-oriented
perspective (Kittler, Rygl, & Mackinnon, 2011). In his groundbreaking studies, he offered some conceptual constructs to decipher the underlying principles of each culture. The most relevant ones for our research are high-context (HC) and low-context (LC) cultures (Hall, 1976; Hall & Hall, 1990). “Context” is the most notable terms here and countries were placed to represent how they differ in their use of context to create and interpret meaning (Hall, 1976; Hall, Slack, & Grossberg, 2016). Likewise, Hofstede and GLOBE models are acknowledged as the two main used cultural indexes in many fields related to international business and communication, and
have been examined to have wider applicability (De Mooij & Hofstede, 2010; Brewer & Venaik, 2010; Shi, & Wang, 2011; Abubakari, Wang, & Paa-Grant, 2018), which allows us to define communication patterns for intercultural comparisons and how cultures could be operationalized (see Table A1 in Appendix B).
All of the above dimensions and indicators help us to have key contours of the subject cultures, and to better explain why and how members of different cultures might code and decode similar messages in a different way.
Culture and ENGO communication strategy on social media
Evidence has shown that cultures matter on ENGOs’ global communication strategy on social media (Gao, 2016; Reese, 2015; Waters & Lo, 2012; Balser, & Macclusky, 2005;
Hermeking, 2005), studies have focused on the role of culture in topics that belong to the
strategic communication and management domain and there have been two main approaches. The first approach has taken the source perspective, that is, to analyze how and to what extent social media content could reflect the particular communicative tactics and differential goals of the content creators (Waters & Lo, 2012; Cheong & Yang, 2017; Reese, 2015). The second approach focuses on the impact of those different strategies on all kinds of outcome variables by
comparison, which emphasizes the engagement of social media users in terms of sharing, liking, and commenting (Waters & Lo, 2012; Saxton & Waters, 2014). For example, Saxton and Waters (2014) have addressed people’s different reaction patterns on social media between eastern and western context, but which elements of sustainability content would better obtain users’ diffusion and how cultural difference would influence that relationship is not well examined yet. Thus, we try to combine those two approaches to seek that void.
For the subject social media platform, Twitter is employed and amended among those studies (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012; Guo & Saxton, 2013; Lovejoy, Waters & Saxton, 2012; Zhang, Tao & Kim, 2014; Gálvez-Rodríguez, Caba-Pérez, & López-Godoy, 2016). Twitter is one of the most popular social networking and microblogging service that allows users to read and post short messages (so-called ‘tweets’) openly with limited of 280 characters. With over 330 million active users (Twitter, 2019), Twitter is still one of the most powerful social media channels used extensively for the discussion of social and environmental topics (Fownes, Yu, & Margolin, 2018), especially popular among international organizations including ENGOs, with regards of to communicate timely, responsively and interactively with audiences (Gálvez-Rodríguez et al., 2016; Waters & Jamal, 2011). Empirical evidence is highly supportive of the use of Twitter by ENGOs to achieve positive communication goals in the diversified environment (Guo & Saxton, 2013), there are many successful sustainability campaigns going viral in recent years (Jechow, 2019; Coombs, 2014; Pınar Özdemir, 2012). In addition, the writings on Twitter not only reflect the cultural background of the users but also shape culture itself dynamically (Waters & Lo, 2012; Miller, 1998). Thus, the interactive nature of the platform makes it a suitable choice for the present study.
Culture and ENGO sustainability communication
Communication for sustainable development is well-documented and has always been treated as a niche concern (Servaes & Lie, 2014; Newig et al., 2013). Despite growing interest in various areas, the way in which ENGOs employ sustainability communication strategies on social media remains more space to explore. As for ENGOs, communication characteristics on social media affect their accountability and credibility of sustainability issues and the public’s
motivation of behavior changing. Consequently, the persuasiveness of messages is important here, which could be understood as using the right content tactics to modify people’s attitudes, beliefs or values, eventually compel people to react for the sender (Villarino & Font, 2015). Increasingly, there is a wealth of scholarship investigate how organizations produce persuasive messages in the field of sustainability communication with the focus on different dimensions: message type, format, content, authority (Nyström & Mustaquim, 2015; Villarino & Font, 2015). Collectively, these literature have identified various aspects of tactics that organizations use to execute their sustainability communication strategies.
Cultural diversity is one of the driving forces of sustainable development (Servaes & Lie, 2014), there is a strong connection between persuasive mechanism and population’s cognizance (O’Keefe, D.J., 2002), while the latter is highly related to cultures (Ki & Shin, 2015). Scholars have empirically investigated several key dimensions that had presented the largest amount of correlations between communication and cultural differences in former cross-cultural studies: high- and low-context (Kim, Pan, & Park,1998; Nishimura et al., 2008; Usunier & Roulin, 2010; Piechota, 2017), power distance (PD), uncertainty avoidance (UA), individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity (Venaik & Brewer, 2010; Brewer & Venaik, 2011; De Mooij & Hofstede, 2010; Valaei et al., 2016). For example, individualism-collectivism is a robust dimension of national cultures and has a positive relationship between an individual’s environmental attitude but for different reasons (Cho, Thyroff, Rapert, Park, & Lee, 2013;
Minkov, 2018). Nevertheless, while a growing number of studies contribute to our understanding of the influence of cultural dimensions on corporate communication, it is our view there is less attention on what elements are associated with discrepant cultures from an ENGO perspective. In other words, which sustainability communication strategy will an ENGO pursue as it tent to
launch global movements in a territory with different or similar cultural characteristics has yet to be examined.
To address that void, efforts were made to find appropriate items that could be used to measure similar or related concepts about sustainability communication. To that spirit, based on findings from cross-cultural psychology, consumer behavior, sustainability, and persuasion communication, we have examined the following dimensions in current study: explicit and implicit, gain and loss frame, social norms, efficacy, and authority, which in turn are made up of a series of variables as explained subsequently. We presumed that there is a direct relationship between different cultural groups and their sustainability communication strategies (see Figure 1).
Cultural dynamics do not only function on message creators (i.e. organizations), but also on receivers (i.e. Twitter users). We are also interested in how Twitter users react to those sustainability messages across cultures. Hence, in this study, our hypotheses also examined how cultures would influence the relationship between the above strategies and people’s engagement (see Figure 2). The measurement we took is by interrogating how many retweets they received because regards to sustainability messages it is more valuable for them to be further passed along than being liked or commented. We assume that the type of cultural context would act as the moderator for the relationship between the various sustainability strategies and the number of retweets.
Figure 2. Conceptual model 2
Explicit versus implicit
According to Hall (1976), HC cultures’ expression is more implicit while people from LC cultures are more in favor of explicit expression. The explicit expression means very direct, clear and straightforward communication, which expresses the sender’s intention specifically and gives little room for confusion or interpretation; while implicit expression needs more context or
cultural qualities to get a message across and the sender will not explain their purpose precisely. People from HC cultures are more capable of integrating information than LC cultures and criticism is subtle (Kim, Pan, & Pack, 1998), implicit expression may be more acceptable for HC cultures while as LC cultures tend to be more context-free and reliance upon explicit cues and direct instruction (Liao, Proctor, & Salvendy, 2008). Thus, our first set of hypotheses suggest that:
Hypothesis 1a: ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are more likely to use implicit expression in their tweets while LC cultures are more likely to communicate explicitly.
Hypothesis 1b: Users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets with implicit expression while users from LC groups have a higher likelihood to retweet the ones with explicit expression.
Gain versus loss frame
Gain and loss frames refer to the strategies that address the benefits of undertaking actions (i.e., gain frame) or the negative consequence of not adopting actions (i.e., loss frame). Message framing is often used by mass media in terms of addressing the social problems and has been empirically proved that it would affect people’s perception of the sustainability information (Tugrul & Lee, 2017; Yoon & Ferle, 2018; Lu, 2015). HC subjects had been examined as to have more difficulty dealing with change and new situation (Kim, Pan, & Pack, 1998) and tend to avoid uncertainty (loss), in consequence, people from similar cultures are more likely to be persuaded by loss messages rather than gain messages (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). The previous study shows that ENGO offered more negative information about the environment on their official posts (Ji, Harlow, Cui, & Wang, 2018). On the other hand, people from LC cultures are more individualistic, favor for self-presentation and embrace the change, they are risk-taken and might more be triggered by gain messages. Based on the preceding information, the second set of hypotheses suggest that:
Hypothesis 2a: ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are more likely to use loss frame in their tweets while LC cultures are more likely to use gain frame.
Hypothesis 2b: Users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets with loss frame while users from LC groups are more likely to retweet the ones with gain frame.
Efficacy
According to Doherty and Webler (2016), enhancing efficacy beliefs will have a positive influence on behavior change. There are different approaches for ENGOs to address efficacy: self-efficacy and collective. Self-efficacy is key to individual’s beliefs in their capacity and actions to solve problems, while collective efficacy refers to people’s beliefs in their collective power to produce desired results is crucial to solving collective problems such as climate change (Chen, 2015). It was reported that there is a negative relationship between
individualism-collectivism and general self-efficacy (Wu, 2009), and collective efficacy may have greater predictive power then self-efficacy in a collective cultural setting (Chen, 2015). Therefore, the third set of hypotheses propose:
Hypothesis 3a: ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are more likely to address collective efficacy in their tweets while LC cultures are more likely to address self-efficacy.
Hypothesis 3b: Users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets addressing collective efficacy while users from LC groups are more likely to retweet the ones addressing self-efficacy.
Social norms
Social norms would be another typical approach for ENGOs to call for action and raise awareness, for the reason that activates social norms in communication can be effective in producing societally beneficial conduct and changing behavior (Cialdini, 2003; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007; Cho, Chung, & Filippova, 2015). We emphasize two types of social norms in this study: 1) descriptive norms, which refer to what most people have done or not done (i.e. The majority of public recycle), and 2) injunctive norms, which refer to
what is approved by society, what should or should not be done (i.e. we should recycle). Cultural differences, as well as differences in terms of normative standards, might explain behavior inconsistencies among people, and that is supported by empirical evidence (Culiberg & Elgaaied-Gambier, 2015; Waters & Lo, 2012). Cultures that are considered as individualist are
characterized as self-orientation rather than reach societal norms and expectations (Hofstede, 2001); whereas in an HC culture people are more involved with one another, they have a higher motivation to secure a favorable impression (Hall, 1976; Kim, Pan, & Park, 1998). Empirical evidence reveals that individuals in collectivist cultures may be more strongly affected by
injunctive norms than people from individualist cultures, and descriptive norms are more focal in western cultures (Gelfand & Harrington, 2015; Jacobson, Mortensen, & Cialdini, 2011; Savani, Morris, & Naidu, 2012). Hence, the following hypotheses propose:
Hypothesis 4a: ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are more likely to address injunctive norms in their tweets while LC cultures are more likely to address descriptive norms.
Hypothesis 4b: Users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets addressing injunctive norms while users from LC groups are more likely to retweet injunctive norms content.
Authority
Authority has been drawn as a contribution to effective sustainability communication based on previous literature (Kim & Ferguson, 2016). The use of celebrity endorsement in communication is related to the dimension of individualism-collectivism, and power distance of different cultures (Hofstede, 2011; Kim & Ji, 2017). Collectivistic cultures are often documented as more hierarchical (House et al., 2004; Schwartz, 1992), people from those cultures are more
interested in concrete project features than abstract content (De Mooij & Hofstede, 2010), and they tend to think about information relationally (Kwon, Saluja & Adaval, 2015), need more concrete evidence, endorsement or credits to change attitudes. In addition, when it comes to information processing, collectivistic cultures will acquire information more via implicit, interpersonal communication than only from media, thus they might trust more on celebrity and word-of-mouth (De Mooij & Hofstede, 2010). Hence, the final set of hypotheses is:
Hypothesis 5a: ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are more likely to involve the authority in their tweets than LC cultures.
Hypothesis 5b: Users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets with authority than LC groups.
Method
The study was conducted as a content analysis (Weber, 1990) of two ENGOs publicly available communication content on Twitter (known as “tweets”). Content analysis is widely used and particularly suitable in the field of cross-cultural studies and business communication because it could reflect what professionals realistically have done in practice across cultures (De Mooi, 2013; Deumes, 2008).
Sample
On the basis of specific measurements and concepts of identification of cultures, we selected our sample territories as representatives for two cultural groups, which are refined as HC and LC groups (see Table 1). Specifically, LC groups exhibit tendencies consistent on relevant dimensions such as low context (Biswas, Olsen, & Valerie, 1992; Callow & Schiffman, 2002;
Miracle, Chang, & Taylor, 1992), information-based, lower power distance and weak uncertainty avoidance, and typical individualistic while favor universalistic normative rules. Comparatively, the other side could be described as engage in high context communication, with certain
collectivism and hierarchical features, high in uncertainty avoidance in general as well as favor authority (Kittler et al., 2011; Arunthanes, Tansuhaj, & Lemak, 1994; Kim et al.,1998; Leets, 2003; Mintu-Wimsatt & Gassenheimer, 2000; Chen, 2016). For example, the United States, a typical low context country, is explicit expression, monochronic thinking while as high context cultures such as Japan and China could be polychronic, the favor of implicit or indirect
expression (Kittler et al.,; Nishimura, et al., 2008).
To avoid doing one case study, we selected two international ENGOs as sample organizations. Greenpeace and WWF were chosen because they have similar qualities in the following criteria: 1) size, 2) funding source, 3) type of mission, 4) sphere of influence, 5) the ability of social media usage and 6) compatibility in cross-cultural communication. Greenpeace and WWF are both actively running various campaigns for pro-environmental issues across the globe, their ultimate goals of communication are calling for actions such as donation, volunteer or at least diffusion. Beyond that, they also made the best use of various social media, in several ways for spreading the messages and increasing the likelihood of social sharing as well as further participation (Nulman & Özkula, 2016; Briggs, Cage, & Briggs, 2017). Greenpeace is good at attention-seeking by posting remarkable visualizations and inflammatory remarks on social media (Ritter & Brevini, 2017; Luxon & Wong, 2017;Pınar Özdemir, 2012), while as WWF is considered to be more tender but use emotional appeals and adopts storytelling approach often as well (Bernritter, Verlegh, & Smit, 2016; Sison, 2013). They have been taken as good examples
for NGOs’ communication by different cultural backgrounds in various studies (Roose, 2012; Auger, 2013; Coombs, 2014; Özdemir, 2012; Ji, Harlow, Cui, & Wang, 2018).
Finally, 12 active Twitter accounts were selected from them that categorized as belonging to either high- or low-context cultures (see Table 2), the accounts were selected based on the following criteria: language, followers, activeness. The final samples are: @Greenpeace East Asia (serving People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea), @Greenpeace Philippines, @Greenpeace India, @WWF Hong Kong, @WWF-Philippines, @WWF-India as representatives of HC cultures, while @Greenpeace UK, @Greenpeace USA, @Greenpeace NZ, @WWF UK, @WWF_Australia, @WWF-Canada as representatives of LC cultures.
We collected the latest 3200 tweets (automatically) from each account via the Twitter application programming interface (API) with Python in the third week of May 2019. After that, around 80 tweets per account were randomly sampled and screened, and should meet the
following criteria: (1) the tweet must be in English, (2) the tweet must be either an original tweet or a reply, but not a retweet, (3) minimum of three words. In total, our final sample included 908 unique tweets (see Table 2). The unit of analysis was one whole tweet text, including the texts of the hashtags. Some variables can be automatically collected from Twitter API (numbers of retweets etc.).
Table 1. Characteristics of sample countries according to Hall, Hofstede
Group Culture Hall (Hall, 1976; Kittler et al., 2011) Hofstede (Hofstede, 2011; Hofstede & Minkov, 2010)
High-context China
Higher-context: contextual elements that should be taken into account and help people to understand the rules, the way things are done are not explicitly stated; group-orientated and
collectivistic, strong boundaries, foster
Power Distance: 80 Uncertainty Avoidance: 30 Individualism: 20 Long-term orientation: 87 Masculinity: 66 Indulgence: 24
Philippines
long-lasting relationship, tend to
maintain harmony Power Distance: 94 Uncertainty Avoidance: 44 Individualism: 32 Long-term orientation: 27 Masculinity: 64 Indulgence: 42 India Power Distance: 77 Uncertainty Avoidance: 40 Individualism: 48 Long-term orientation: 51 Masculinity: 56 Indulgence: 26 Low-context United Kingdom
Lower-context: cultures ideas are expected to be outspoken very straightforward, most of the things require explanation, explicit communication, direct and
confrontational; individualistic, task more important than relationships, flexible and open grouping patterns, changing as needed. Power Distance: 35 Uncertainty Avoidance: 35 Individualism: 89 Long-term orientation: 51 Masculinity: 66 Indulgence: 69 United States Power Distance: 40 Uncertainty Avoidance: 46 Individualism: 91 Long-term orientation: 26 Masculinity: 62 Indulgence: 68 Australia Power Distance: 36 Uncertainty Avoidance: 51 Individualism: 90 Long-term orientation: 21 Masculinity: 61 Indulgence: 71 Canada Power Distance: 39 Uncertainty Avoidance: 48 Individualism: 80 Long-term orientation: 36 Masculinity: 52 Indulgence: 68
Note: Each of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions has been expressed on a scale that runs roughly from 0 to 100.
Table 2 Frequency of Sample Twitter Accounts
Cultural Groups Twitter Accounts Frequency Percentage
High Context Greenpeace East Asia 79 8.7
Greenpeace Philippines 76 8.4 Greenpeace India 70 7.7 WWF Hong Kong 72 7.9 WWF Philippines 76 8.4 WWF India 77 8.5 HC total 450 49.6
Low Context Greenpeace UK 75 8.3
Greenpeace USA 77 8.5 Greenpeace NZ 70 7.7 WWF UK 77 8.5 WWF Australia 80 8.8 WWF Canada 79 8.7 LC total 458 50.4
Coding procedures and intercoder reliability
A codebook with instructions for coders as well as definitions and explanations for each variable is employed as the coding instrument (see Codebook in Appendix A). Coders judged the sample tweets along with five sets of variables. The content analysis involved three bilingual
coders who were extensively trained in particular categories. The coding time for each tweet was 3-5 minutes, the coding team was trained with the first author on specific items for about 90 minutes, and the coding time was 60 hours in all. 14.5% of the total sample tweets (n=132) were selected and double-coded for inter-coder reliability test. Krippendorff’s alpha was employed to measure inter-coder reliability (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007), and the results showed that the levels were satisfactory with scores ranging from .68 to 1.00 for all the items (see Table 3).
Measurements
The items we used to measure our constructs in the codebook are based on cross-cultural psychology, consumer behavior, sustainability, and persuasion communication studies. Although some concepts are contingent and hard to define, we try our best to offer clear instructions and examples (see Table 3). A single tweet could have multiple strategies, but all tweets have at least one of the following presenting tactics.
As for the sustainability communication strategies, all the variables were measured as dichotomous variables (0 = not present, 1 = present). Explicit strategy refers to univocal content states the sender’s intention clearly by specifying or emphasizing the explicit information concerning solution/action/behavior, for example by calling the public or receiver to do
something directly; while as implicit expression refers to the content that not specify the required reaction and there is always some space for audiences to interpret, they don’t give away the full answers and sometimes use words that with context undertones, indirect approaches creating emotions and atmosphere by visuals and symbols. For the framing messages, gain frame refers to positive actions or the consequences/outcomes (i.e. hope) of undertaking some actions while loss frame refers to the negative action or consequences/outcomes of some behaviors. In terms of
efficacy, self-efficacy refers to people’s belief in their capacity and actions to solve environmental problems, which implies self-orientation; while collective efficacy refers to people’s belief in collective actions that could solve perceived collective problems, which implies group
orientation. In regards to social norms, descriptive norms refer to what most people have done or not done (i.e., ‘the majority of publics recycle’ ) while injunctive norms refer to what is approved of, what should or should not be done (i.e. ‘we should recycle’). For authority, it is about if there are any authorized endorsements/credits, including information that endorses or vests by statistics evidence from opinion leaders, celebrities, mainstream media, government, or experts; or links to the convincible source (both internal and external). Engagement was measured by retweets, which reflects the number of retweets that each tweet has received as continuous numerals.
Table3 Measurement and Krippendorff's Alpha Reliability Results
Variable Alpha Example
Explicit .70 It’s time to end the use of single plastic! Implicit .70 Monument in the right direction!
Gain Frame .78 It’s up to corporations to eliminate single-use plastics! Loss Frame .76 Biodiversity continues declining at unprecedented rates.
Once these habitats and species are gone, there's no coming back!
Self-efficacy .69 You can make the world more beautiful by caring for our planet.
Collective efficacy .68 Together we can create strong ocean protections for Aotearoa.
Descriptive social norms 1.00 The majority of publics recycle. Injunctive social norms .78 We should recycle.
Result
To answer the research questions, independent sample T-tests and univariate analysis were conducted in SPSS to assess the differences between the two cultures based on all the retained variables.
Strategy difference across cultures
With respect to the hypothesis H1a-H5a, the results of the independent sample T-tests showed that the sample ENGOs have some different attitudes in processes of communication strategies on Twitter in a few analyzed areas, all the results are presented in Table A2 in the Appendix B. In general, ENGOs are more likely to express their intentions explicitly, however there is a slightly significant difference in the use of explicit strategy for HC cultures (M=.68, SD=.47) and LC cultures (M=.60, SD=.49), t(906)=2.51, p<.05; the same result has been found towards implicit strategy for HC (M=.31, SD=.46) and LC cultures (M=.40, SD=.49), t(906)=-2.65, p<.01. These results suggest that HC groups are more likely to use explicit expression than LC cultures, which is on the contrary to our H1a, as it cannot be supported.
On the other hand, there is no significant result that had been found towards gain frame for HC cultures (M=.37, SD=.48) and LC cultures (M=.36, SD=.48), t(906)=340, p=.734; neither loss frame for HC cultures (M=.30, SD=.46) and LC cultures (M=.26, SD=.44), t(906)=1.346, p=.179. Similarly, in terms of efficacy strategies, HC cultures (M=.05, SD=.23) and LC cultures (M=.04, SD=.21) used self-efficacy in the same manner (t(906)=.678, p=.498); and they both barely address collective efficacy on Twitter because the t-test result is insignificant
(t(906)=1.699, p=.09) between HC cultures (M=.08, SD=.27) and LC cultures (M=.05, SD=.22). Therefore, H2a and H3a cannot be supported.
With regards to social norms, there was a significant difference in the use of injunctive norms for HC cultures (M=.35, SD=.48) and LC groups (M=.23, SD=.42), t(906)=3.86, p<.001, which means ENGOs’ branches from HC cultures are much more likely to use injunctive norms than the other one. To contrast, no significant result had been found towards descriptive norms between HC cultures (M=.03, SD=.17) and LC cultures (M=.05, SD=.23), t(906)=-1.745, p=.81. Thus, H4a cannot be fully supported.
Another strongly significant result for HC cultures (M=.24, SD=.43) and LC cultures (M=.44, SD=.50) had been found in the use of authority strategy (t(906)=-6.598, p<.001), the results reveal that LC cultures use more authority endorsement on their tweets than HC cultures, which is the opposite to our expectation and H5a cannot be supported.
Culture, strategy, and engagement
With respect to the hypothesis H1b-H5b, ANOVA analysis was conducted on the influence of type culture and strategies and the interaction effect between type culture and strategies on the number of retweets in one sitting. Culture type included two levels (HC and LC cultures), and all the strategies consisted of two levels (present and not present).
Cultural differences are distinctly visible in retweeting behavior as regards to all types of strategies as the main effects were statistically significant at the .05 significance level between HC cultures (M=7.71, SD=15.52) and LC cultures (M=20.99, SD=39.09). All results are shown in Table A3 in the Appendix B. Specifically, as for the explicit strategy, the main effect for culture type yields an F ratio of F(1,904)=34.96, p<.001 while no main effect for the explicit strategy was ever obtained, F(1,904)=1.61, p=.204. However, the interaction effect was significant, F(1,904)=4.13, p<.05. As shown in Figure A1 in Appendix B, the results indicating that users
from LC cultures are more likely to retweet the content which uses the explicit expression. In terms of implicit strategy, the main effect for culture type was significant as F(1,904)=34.83, p<.001, while the main effect for the implicit strategy was not significant as F(1,904)=1.68, p=.195. Likewise, the interaction effect was significant, F(1,904)=4.37, p<.05. As shown in Figure A2 in Appendix B, HC cultures have a higher likelihood to retweet the tweets with implicit strategy. Thus, the combination of the above results can explain H1b in the expected direction.
As for framing usage, the main effect for culture type yield an F ratio of F(1,904)=45.81, p<.001 on gain frame and an F(1,904)=41.23, p<.001 on loss frame, However, the main effect for both gain (F(1,904)=.73, p=.394) and loss (F(1,904)=3.16, p=.076) strategy were not significant, and the interaction effect was insignificant as well, as F(1,904)=1.26, p=.267 on gain frame and F(1,904)=-54, p=.462 for loss frame. Therefore, H2b cannot be supported.
Similar results had been found towards efficacy strategies. The main effect for culture type yield an F ratio of F(1,904)=17.66, p<.001 on self-efficacy and an F(1,904)=23.27, p<001 on collective efficacy. Likewise, the main effect for both self-efficacy (F(1,904)=.54, p=.462) and collective efficacy (F(1,904)=1.04, p=.309) strategy were not significant, and the interaction effect was insignificant either, as an F ratio of F(1,904)=2.16, p=.142 on self-efficacy and F(1,904)=3.29, p=.070 for collective efficacy. Therefore, H3b cannot be supported.
In regards to social norms, the main effect for culture type yield an F ratio of
F(1,904)=4.49, p<.05 on descriptive norms, while the main effect for descriptive social norms was not significant as F(1,904)=001, p=.976, and the interaction effect was insignificant, F(1,904)=.29, p=.593. To the contrary, the main effect for culture type yields an F ratio of F(1,904)=84.71, p<.001, while the main effect for injunctive social norms yielded an significant
result as an F(1,904)=32.00, p<.001, and the interaction effect was significant, F(1,904)=31.91, p<.001. From Figure A3 and A4 in Appendix B, we can see that users from HC cultures are more likely to retweet the content which uses the descriptive norms while user from LC cultures have a higher likelihood to retweet the tweets with injunctive norms, However, those strongly significant results were found but it cannot be explained in the expected direction. H4b cannot be supported.
For the last hypothesis, the main effect for culture type yields an F ratio of
F(1,904)=37.54, p<.001 on authority, as shown in Figure A5 in Appendix B. It reveals that people from LC cultures are more likely to retweet the tweets with authority. However, no significant main effect for authority was found, for an F ratio of F(1,904)=1.44, p=.230, and the interaction effect was not significant either, F(1,904)=.65, p=.420. Therefore, due to the lack of interaction effect, H5b cannot be supported.
Conclusion and Discussion
The cultures we grow and live with have always shaped us. Cultures and languages have been shown to lead to differences in communication style on social media, while at the same time social media content is assumed to be the reflection of patterns and values of different cultures.
In this study, we combine some of the most widely used cultural dimensions to
demonstrate the cross-cultural influence on ENGOs’ sustainability communication activities on Twitter and how is the effect of those strategies on audience engagement across cultures. Our analysis shows that ENGOs from two cultural groups had implemented some pervasive and effective sustainability communication strategies and they both aim to be persuasive but use contrasting approaches between times. With regards to engagement, on the whole people from LC cultures are more willing to interact with ENGOs and express themselves on social media.
Culture only influences the relationship between the content with explicit/implicit and injunctive social norms strategies and people’s retweet behavior. Even though the hypotheses of our study were not all verified, the mixed results surely give us plenty of room for reflection and further discussion.
In general, ENGOs from both high and low context cultures employing many similar tactics on Twitter by addressing injunctive norms frequently and calling for action explicitly, adopting gain or loss frames, and offering related information from reliable sources. It seems that there is a typical pattern of their important tweets, which would be like: firstly to point out the sustainability issues (used gain or loss frame), then to specify what people are already done or should have done (mostly emphasized injunctive social norms), and encourage the needed action or initiatives directly and explicitly by the end. Hashtags are implemented frequently for calling for action, such as #breakfreefromplastic.
In terms of cultural differences, the emphasis on injunctive norms is very evident for HC cultures as we presumed. However, their audiences are more willing to retweet messages that contain descriptive norms while users from LC cultures are more likely to engage with those that address injunctive social norms. The possible explanation would be people endure more social pressure in HC cultures so they tend to follow the trend (Cheong & Yang, 2017), conversely, in low context society there is less social pressure and people are more willing to share their
intention and positive feelings openly (Makri & Schlegelmilch, 2017; Mazur & Li, 2016; Waters & Lo, 2012). Thus, it seems clear that it may be more impactive and effective for the HC cultures to adopt descriptive norms and for LC cultures to address injunctive norms in regard to
Nevertheless, to our surprise, we had two statistically significant results that are contrary to our expectations. Specifically, although both of them tend to employ more explicit expression in general, ENGOs from HC cultures have a higher likelihood to use explicit strategy while the other group has a higher likelihood to use implicit strategy. One possible explanation for that could be, people from HC countries have lower awareness for sustainability issues and less knowledge of the advocated solutions so ENGOs have to point out the intentions and purposes clearly. On the contrary, people from LC cultures have a preference for sarcasm and humor when it comes to social issues on social media (Anderson & Huntington, 2017; Yue, Jiang, Lu, & Hiranandani, 2016), those communication styles are very implicit and required people’s ability to introspection (Peter & Honea, 2012). Another speculation could be the natural quality of the language they used, which is English, a more explicit alphabetic language than ideographical language (i.e. Chinese). For further discussion, given the influence of western cultures, there are some arguments about western linear communication pattern tend to be a better fit in digital communication (Usunier & Roulin, 2010), as a result, the new technology could be a reason for making different society more and more similar (Hofstede, 2011). Interestingly, when it comes to audience engagement, people from LC groups are more likely to engage with explicit content while users from the other culture group retweet more implicit tweets. The lower retweet rate of HC cultures could be explained as skepticism of ENGOs because they often are treated as an instrument of governments and the symbol of international diplomatic events (Reese, 2015). These seemingly contradictory results reveal that ENGOs should pay more attention to their narratives based on not only cultural context but also distinct sustainability initiatives and communication goals.
Another unexpected result is about authority. Evidence or endorsement by authority is commonly used by them as well, since most of the sustainability initiatives need more
information to back it up and could make organizations to get more trustworthiness (Waters & Jamal, 2011). Nonetheless, ENGOs from LC cultures use the authority to endorse more than HC cultures, as the opposite to our expectation. A possible interpretation may be our sample LC cultures are all from developed countries, where people have stronger awareness and already pay close attention to sustainability issues (Tam & Chan, 2017). Therefore, ENGOs from LC groups could have more available reliable resources from mainstream media or more endorsement from celebrities.
Cultural context differences can be viewed as either a roadblock or a useful breakthrough for communication, that we should leverage the benefits of it in a wide range of contexts (Stahl, Miska, Lee, & Luque,2017). Based on such findings and related research work, we may offer some meaningful implications for ENGOs practical work: firstly, it is necessary to develop separate strategies for effective selection of persuasive tactics for environmental causes, professionals should do more market and trend research, and find the most powerful tactics to trigger the right contemplation for people to change behavior (Peter & Honea, 2012) from different cultural perspectives. For ENGOs running in HC cultures, due to the overall lower engagement rates, it may be more effective to address descriptive norms and focus on community building; while for LC cultures, it would be necessary to have a more flexible combination of strategies due to different sustainability initiatives. Furthermore, although we should customize the communication messages based on the specific context, the tactics we had examined could work together and to be more persuasive effective, for example, the combination of gain and loss frame with emotional appeals (Lu, 2015). While the findings from our research may bring new
insights into the field of sustainability communication and cross-cultural studies, they should be interpreted with caution, because the ambivalent attitudes toward sustainability behavior are always there (Chang, 2011). Last but not least, ENGOs’ communication for sustainability has not made full use of the power and the potential of social media, two-way interactive communication still needs to improve based on similar studies as we have done. For NGOs who have a limited marketing budget, it would be the best way to save budget for advertisement and get to know their stakeholders, then produce the desirable cross-cultural communication outcomes of localizing adaption and stakeholder management.
It is important to note, there are several limitations to our study. First of all, the academic model and theories we had used have their own limitations. A number of critiques have been addressed to Hall’s framework as a too simplistic description of both communication and culture, implicit assumption of concepts and lack of empirical foundation and consistency (Usunier & Roulin, 2010; Kittler et al., 2011). The validity of measures (Brewer & Venaik, 2011; Venaik & Brewer, 2013), limited understanding and ambiguity of the concepts (Javidan, House, Dorfman, Hanges, & Luque, 2006; De Mooij, 2013; Beugelsdijk, Maseland, & Hoorn, 2015) of Hofstede model has been criticized as well. Therefore, not only the sample accounts we chose is in a limited quantity but also our classification of them is not necessarily rational. And since each culture has its own characteristics, it would be too rough to cluster them into two groups. Future studies may put emphasis on the comparison of specific countries and give more concrete discussion. In addition, most of the theoretical basis of this study is originated from a more individualistic western context. It can be argued that there might be some bias in those studies and could not provide a very impartial representation of the complexity of all types of cultures. Another big concern is the coding of the tweets. Given the coders are all from the same cultural
background (Chinese), it is possible that there is a circumscribed understanding and interpretation of the content. In retrospect, it would have been helpful to involve more coders from different cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, due to the constraints of time and manpower, only the limited variables were tested. Much more research is needed before one can measure the sustainability concepts in an accurate and comprehensive way. Self-identity (Whitmarsh, & Oneill, 2010), use of multimedia, emotional appeal, there are more sustainability-related concepts that should be examined in future studies and it would be better to convey more different cultures. In addition, another intriguing idea is to use some effective ways to analyze a bigger sample, for example using machine learning for supervised automated content analysis. In the end, we can imagine that there would be more obstacles and difficulties for sustainability communication from individual, contextual, institutional, cultural levels, which could constrain publics from truly changing beliefs, attitudes and behaviors (Gleim, Smith, Andrews, & Cronin, 2013; Gilliam & Haigh, 2017; Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, & Whitmarsh, 2007; Yi, Feiock, & Berry, 2017). Combination of research method from diverse perspectives could be a better way to have more concrete results.
By applying sustainability communication to culturally different social media settings, this article extends our understanding of how ENGOs use social media to communicate with their publics. The outcome of this study contributes to future empirical research in the field of cross-cultural studies and ENGOs’ sustainability communication. And the implications could inspire professionals for improving intercultural and persuasive capacity, to involve their target groups by implementing suitable communication plans on each local social media platforms, thereby advance the communicative purposes, practices, and prospects.
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