Introduction

The sustainability movement can be traced back as early as 1963, with the “Scarcity and Growth” report being the earliest academic depiction of environmental and sustainability concerns (Barnett & Morse, 1963).  Sustainability and ecological preservation became a global movement on 22^nd April 1970, with the introduction of an annual Earth Day.  In 1987 the sustainability movement again gained momentum with the publication of the United Nations Brundtland Report, better known as Our Common Future (Ravago, Balisacan, & Chakravorty, 2015).

In 2016, the first known academic article linking sustainability reporting and social media appeared in the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal where sustainability reporting was discussed in the context of financial sustainable accounting as opposed to environmental and societal sustainability reporting (Manetti & Bellucci, 2016). Sustainability reporting in the context of environmental and societal concerns entered the academic literature in 2014 (Reilly & Hynan, 2014) where 16 global companies’ social media was examined for sustainability related concerns.

In 2020, Lodhia, Kaur & Stone argued that with the changing landscape of sustainability reporting from traditional media to digital media, more Top 50 ASX companies are using social media as a tool to legitimise their existence to stakeholders and local community (Lodhia, Kaur, & Stone, 2020).

Increasingly digital shaming from infuriated external stakeholders on social media manifests itself as outrage culture (Romano, 2020), resulting in the rapid dissemination of defaming information, real or perceived, against mining and infrastructure organisations.  Learning from the experiences of major infrastructure and mining projects with significant activism promoted through social media, it is becoming increasingly evident that environmentally high impact industry sectors need to look beyond regulatory sustainability reporting platforms to secure society’s approval and support.

Using social media for sustainability reporting is an emerging research area in the field of stakeholder communications. There is an increasing interest in the under researched area of assessing how stakeholder theory can best be applied to social media communications in order to improve stakeholder relationships (Moffat & Zhang, 2014).

To date, no study has explicitly looked at the use of social media for sustainability reporting by infrastructure or resource companies. The study addresses this significant research gap in examining the extent to which resource organisations currently report sustainability issues on social media and the degree to which stakeholder theory is applied to these communications.  This was achieved by integrating collections of literature on sustainability reporting, stakeholder theory and digital communications.

Focusing on the research question ‘To what extent do mid-tier resource organisations in Western Australia include sustainability reporting in their social media communications to stakeholders?’ the author seeks to understand the status quo of sustainability reporting on social media by a random sampling of mid-tier resource companies in Western Australia.   A better understanding of how resource organisations currently report sustainability on social media will enable the author to examine ways of integrating stakeholder theory into social media communications to mitigate the risk of Outrage Culture leading to the hinderance of resource projects and operations.