Bridging for profit and non-profit

To benefit from Corporate Social Responsibility, companies need to build awareness around their activities by communicating them to stakeholders. Therefore, the companies engage in discourse creation around the topics they interact with, one of them being forced migration. Especially in the wake of the Syrian emergency mediatized in 2015, and more recently the Ukrainian emergency that outbroke in 2022, many companies implemented CSR activities aimed at helping the forcibly displaced people and started to communicate about forced migration. Limited research has been conducted on the representations of forced migrants provided by technological companies. The communication of the rest of the private sector remains largely understudied. In this research, we address this academic gap by studying how companies represent forcibly displaced people and related emergencies in their online communication to external stakeholders. We do so by conducting a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the organic social media content of five multinational companies from different sectors, namely Google, McKinsey & Company, Starbucks, Airbnb, and IKEA. The analysis includes Twitter and YouTube content, and the linked website entries. The study revealed heterogeneity of representations, having a mixed influence on shaping the private sector’s discourses, that were categorized into three themes: more positive representations of the forcibly displaced people as specific, ‘empowered’ individuals’; more negative representations of forcibly displaced people as agency-lacking receivers of help dependent on the Northern benevolence; and dehumanizing representation of forced migration as a crisis. Some of these findings are contingent with the previous research on the private sector’s and other relevant stakeholders’ discourses around the topic. However, the study also brings important, new insights and extends the academic understanding of corporate communication about forced migration. Primarily analyzing strategies of representation, the study brings media genre and sector-specific insights, as well as pays attention to the motivation behind CSR, and the influence of all the above on displayed power relationships between the Global North and the Global South.