trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

ownership structure was released. It stated that Botnia’s Uruguay-based functions had been transferredto UPM-Kymmene Corp., another Finnish forest industry company.3. Data Collection and AnalysisStakeholder analysis was performed using media texts. The material was gathered from the largest andmost respected newspaper in Argentina, El Clarin. The investigated time period starts in March 2005and ends in May 2009, and thus comprehensively covers the main events related to the pulp mill projectfrom the beginning of the construction works to transferring the operations of the mill to UPM-Kymmene Oy. The newspaper articles were selected by using the search words “Botnia” and “Uruguay”in the electronic archive of the paper. Altogether, 445 newspaper articles were included in our data(Table 1).Table 1. Number of articles published in El Clarin March 2005 – May 2009YearArticles published in El Clarin (n)2005 352006 1512007 1672008 772009 15Total 445The study draws on social constructionist media studies, and treats the press releases and mediatexts as accounts constructing the social realities of firm-stakeholder relationships instead of reportsreflecting the existing reality of those relationships (cf., Gamson et al., 1992). From this perspective,texts form a scene of continuous struggle for the ‘right’ concepts, meanings and definitions, and are apart of the political and economic power machinery, but simultaneously also a part of their users’meaning production (Fairclough, 1992; Gamson & Lasch, 1983). Thus, while media is considered as onestakeholder, the focus of this research is not so much on describing the role of media in realityconstruction, but rather, on the ways by which media texts join in constituting the meaning makingenvironment for strategic decision making.The analysis was carried out in three phases. In the first phase, the research data consisting of mediatexts in Spanish were gathered by a Spanish-speaking research assistant. The assistant collected thenewspaper articles and condensed the contents of each article into a few sentences in English. Thisresulted to a table in English presenting the events, the related stakeholders and their actions as well aspreliminary salience assessment. In the second phase, the table was checked in collaborative processwith the research assistant and three researchers in order to discuss and correct any entries that wereunclear or open to various interpretations mostly due to translation issues.In the third phase, three researchers performed a collaborative analysis on the data presented inEnglish focusing on the identification of the stakeholders and on assessing their salience by following theprinciples of qualitative content analysis (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004; Elo & Kyngäs, 2007). To363